Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - April 2025

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Thank you for being part of the resistance!

A loyal band of people flipping pages in the age of infinite scrolls!

Last issue I shared some of your letters in the opening. It was popular so I'm doing it again! Scroll down to the picture if you want to skip to the reviews.

In response to my last ​Book Club​ (​03/2025​) Beth A. wrote:

I use this newsletter as a form of entertainment, as a form of finding books to add to my to-read list, and as a way to hear from someone else with a slightly different point of view. I'm challenged to read outside my genre and comfort. It makes me a better reader and a better person. I also appreciate Leslie's additions for the same reason.

Thanks Beth! Leslie is back this month with a book she’s been raving about. I love hearing about different reading habits so much. Mary S. shared hers:

I do not have time for much fiction. I am much more interested in learning about relevant world problems and subjects like longevity and brain trauma research. Right now I am reading ‘​The Ageless Brain​’ by Dale Bredesen.

Looks great. Adding to my TBR! Thanks Mary. And then Bo B. wrote saying:

I also recently read Sahil's ‘​5 Types of Wealth​,’ and I can totally relate to your review. The book is quite an accomplishment, how he brought together some of the most popular studies, practices, and principles. The bibliography section alone is probably worth the price of the book. I can see it showing up in lists like “Most Practical Books for Graduates” or something. But did I like the book? Would I recommend it to a friend? That's tougher for me to answer. I found it mildly exhausting to read for any stretch of time, like doing a mental HIIT workout. Maybe it's too optimized, kinda how a ChatGPT summary of an article seems to lose the charm of the fabric of thought that the author was working with. I highlighted the hell out of the book, but I wouldn't say it was an enjoyable read. In contrast, I also read ‘​The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life​’ by Boyd Varty. It's a fraction of the length. There are virtually no references to any studies. But I found this book to have much more heart, and the message was more impactful. I recommend it!

Thank you, Bo! Always good to hear from you. The book recos we share here are gold. I value this Saturday morning coffee shop chat so much. We help each other grow. I'd like to start ‘opening letters’ as a regular feature! If I feature a snip of your letter (i.e., email-reply) to my book club I'll sign and mail you ​a book​ to say thanks. OK, finally this month let's go to Devra T.:

Must hear more about FFF!! I've been thinking about the comings and goings of friendships, having naturally grown out of one last year and we are building a new one with some of our youngest daughter's friend's parents currently. I haven't read widely on the topic (yet), being a natural extrovert I am quick to ‘make friends.’ But it is true that we expect friendships, like romantic relationships, to be effortless, and if there is effort involved, then it's not worthwhile to continue trying. The same is true of neighbors and neighborhoods. To ponder when looking at the rise in loneliness.

Interesting, Devra. Thank you. Friendships are definitely two-way. My favorite book on friends is ​Robin Dunbar's​ ‘How Many Friends Does One Person Need?’ (​BO2023​).

Fun hearing from you and keep ’em coming. Apologies in advance if I miss your note or don't reply. I try!

Now let's hit the books!

Neil

P.S. I don't advertise. This is word of mouth. Invite others ​here​.

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1. ​High Five​ by Adam Rubin. Illustrated by Daniel Salmieri. I think this is the most underrated children’s book of the past few years. Came out in 2019 before getting buried in pandemic quicksand. Bookstores closed, browsing closed—boxing-glove-to-jaw punchout for picture books. Yet years later I still find myself turning to it every month or two when I’ve been away and need a fun, long, cuddly half-hour read to fill up. Who else has a good book for staying in their kid's beds—lingering, loitering, lavishly languishing? The book opens with an announcement! Told in just two of its magnificent forty rhyming paragraphs:

For the rest of the book the reader is thrust into participating in the “75th Annual High Five Tournament” and then steps into the ring to physically battle—high five!—a series of contestants ranging from “Gigantic The Bear with 700 pounds of hair” to “Kangaroo Paul with Fastest Hands Of Them All” to “Octopus Jones” who, of course, requires eight high fives to defeat. With a scribbly first-person perspective and boxing-ring-style judges rating your high fives in front of a thunderous crowd in a packed arena, you somehow manage to obliterate the competition. Reads like you’re Little Mac playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!. Who is the scarier final opponent?

I’m adding this to my new list (​Neil.blog​, ​Goodreads​) called “Massively Underrated Picture Books.”

2. ​In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed ​by Carl Honoré. Do you inspect other people’s bookshelves? It’s okay. You can admit it. You’re not judging them—​no book guilt, no book shame!​—but … getting to know them. Paying attention to what they’re paying attention to! (​Anne Bogel ​of ​What Should I Read Next?​ shares this fascination and we discussed it in ​Union Square​). Well, I’m a book shelf inspector too, and thank goodness for that. Otherwise I may never have found this gem more than a decade ago when I visited my then-girlfriend Leslie’s parent’s house and found a couple bookshelves by the ping pong table. I love this book. I’ve read it three times now. If you don’t know Carl Honoré you could start with his hit 2005 TED Talk ​of the same name​. Or, you know, ​just read the transcript​. Why? Because as Carl says: “Everyone wants to know how to slow down but they want to know how to slow down quickly.” Since its 2004 publication this magnum opus has only become more important. On page 9 Carl quotes Milan Kundera’s ‘Slowness’ (​3/2025​) “When things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself.” Milan Kundera, where art thou now? Maybe having coffee in the clouds with ​Neil Postman​, ​Jiddu Krishnamurti​, and ​David Foster Wallace​? Part of the reason I force myself to write these superlong book clubs, and do them by, you know, writing with my own fingers instead of using AI is … to help my own brain slow down. We have to remember: Endless scrolling was invented in 2006, TikTok in 2016, 5-second images of anything you can think of in 2025. We are experiencing a grand quickening. The danger is that Kundera’s prophecy may come true. Step one in steadying yourself in the tidal wave? Read this book. Learn to find your own pace in the machine and find areas in your life you can purposefully shift the gears back down to “human.” One of the most eye-opening sections comes early when from pages 42-44 ​he traces the resistance to the cult of speed over the ages​. There are so many tidbits on slowing down, though—in food, in sex, in … everything. On page 228 he describes how educator Jenny Harley and her reading club consumed ‘​Little Dorrit​’ by Charles Dickens (1812-1870) “in the same way it would have been read in its day—in monthly instalments spread over a year and a half.” I love that! And what does she say afterwards? “When you rattle through it, you don’t appreciate some of the jokes and waiting games, and the play that Dickens makes with secret stories and hidden plots.” Secret stories? Hidden plots? Sounds like detail, mystery, complexity, nuance! Not sure about you but I’m not getting much of that on social media. How about this provocative idea on page 101: “In a recent British show, motorists caught driving too fast in a school zone were given a choice between paying the fine and facing the local children. Those who chose the latter sat ashen-faced at the head of a classroom, fielding poignant questions from kids as young as six: How would you feel if you ran me over? What would you say to my parents if you killed me? The drivers were visibly shaken. One woman wept. All went away vowing never to break the speed limit again.” Crazy idea? Bit unethical as rich people can just buy their way out, maybe? (Should we adopt the ​Finnish community trust-building strategy of charging traffic violations as a percentage of income​?) This book isn’t just preaching a “slow at all costs vibe” though. It’s preaching mastery. (​Preach about mastery, Derek​!) Silencing your inner sea so greatness can bubble up from the deep. He peppers in great quotes from Captain J. A. Hadfield (“This art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of energy in our great men.”) and Albert Einstein (“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.”) Taken together it’s a manifesto—a hold onto your caps and your brains, folks—as we continue plugging ourselves deeper into the matrix. Benefits of meditation, resurgence of tantra sex, how garden views reduce pain—it’s all here. A masterful tour de force.

3. ​Ghost​ by Jason Reynolds. A 180-page, 14-point-font book you will feel, love, learn from, and fly through. My wife was scrolling through ​Indigo’s well-curated lists​ hunting for books for our oldest. He’d just finished the 5-book ‘​The Academy​’ series—about a boy who works towards living his dream playing in the ​Premier League​—and she found … this. Confusing title, maybe. Ghost? But it pulls you in with a loud, punchy, center-channel voice. Ghost is the self-anointed nom-de-plume of Castle Cranshaw, a poor seventh grade kid who accidentally joins a local track team and finds himself addressing his own trauma (on page 5 his dad drunkenly fires a gun at him and his mom as they flee their apartment and gets sentenced to 10 years in prison) and anger (he punches a bully out in the cafeteria a few pages later) on a deep, visceral, emotional level. Jason Reynolds is a magician. And the voice—what a voice. From page 4: “I got to punch that jerk Brandon in the face—I know, I know, not cool, but still!—leave school early, and hang out at the track with my new coach—because I was on a team now—who turned out to be a pretty cool dude. Me and Coach didn’t go no further into my life or nothing like that, which was a good thing because I never really told nobody about my dad.” Perfect storytelling, memorable characters—it'll have you feeling like you can do the 100 meters in under 10 by the end.

4. ​Educated: A Memoir​ by Tara Westover. Years ago I flew to New York for ​Book Expo​ and went to some fancy dinner with my literary agent and a dozen publishing people. I remember like half of them were carrying this book. So I bought it … and put it on my shelf … where it sat for 7 years until the ever-insightful ​Kim Holderness​ told me it’s one of her 3 most formative (along with ‘​Quiet​’ by Susan Cain [​2/2020​] and ‘​Bossypants​’ by Tina Fey) and that she still thinks about every week. Every week? 7 years later? I cracked it open. And the energy that shot out of the pages kept me gripped late into the night for weeks. The book took me far, far away before slingshotting me back to a here and now that felt strange and familiar. We open in the 90s on the side of an Idaho mountain where “cliffs appeared suddenly [and] feral horses, belonging to my grandpa, ran wild over thick banks of water hemlock, and there were more than a few rattlesnakes.” Tara tells her tale in endless tight, gripping stories from her vantage point as the youngest of seven in a large family with an extremist father who works at “scrapping” and doesn’t trust the government or doctors or schools. (“I may as well surrender my kids to the devil himself as send them down the road to that school.”) No one goes to school. They wander, work, get hit in the head by metal tossed at them by their dad, fall off skids high in the air on unstable forklifts their dad is steering and crack their heads on concrete, get into car accidents in the middle of nights in their car full of kids lying everywhere with no seatbelts, and drive with their mom to high-risk pregnancies helping deliver babies for people who would rather die than go to a hospital. This book isn’t as good as everyone says—it’s better. Slap to the face, splash to the face. And it’s two books, really. The first half you’re living a wild, thrilling, confusing, loving, frenzied upbringing of self-discovery and the second you’re with Tara as she goes to BYU then Cambridge then Harvard then Cambridge again. Together they make a sour-sweet-sour read that is a wondrous eyes-open summary of the supremely talented Tara Westover’s first 34 years. A take-your-breath-away book.

5. ​The Days Are Just Packed: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection​ by Bill Watterson (b. 1958). Last week I saw ​Ryan Holiday​ ask people on Twitter, “What’s your favorite book to re-read?” so I threw in my response:

Replying made me realize I ... hadn’t actually picked up a Calvin and Hobbes in a while. Over a year? For sure I read the first and last ones when ​Daniels​ (​Everything Everywhere All At Once​) picked them as formative. But it's been too long! The strip is one of the world’s most exquisite artistic feats. For ten straight years from 1985 to 1995 Bill Watterson (then aged 27 to 37) published a brand new Calvin and Hobbes strip … every day. Every day! And this collection in particular is his first “widescreen” book where Watterson, who was being published in over 2000 major newspapers at the time, unleashed his full powers and unshackled himself from the constrained universe of small-box funnies. Like on page 7 and 10 of the book the first two Sunday strips still have that awkward-but-mandatory “2-panel punchline” because some papers ran with the header and some ran without:

But Watterson then started putting out his newfangled “take it or leave it” big Sunday rectangles which trashed convention and introduced dynamic new ways to tell stories. (I love the opening line in the first-ever Sunday box-busting strip with Calvin transgressively saying: “If you ask me, Hobbes, the whole notion of ‘instant gratification’ is a myth!”) By the end of this book he's doing acrobatic leaps, bounds—into the clouds, into the stratosphere—beyond the reach of every other cartoonist of the time and (maybe) since:

Watterson never commercialized Calvin. No ads, no sponsors, no commercials, no interruptions. I love it. I admire it. I respect it. There are no Hobbes stuffies, no Miss Wormwood dartboards, no horrible "Calviner and Hobbes" Netflix version with too-high-pitched-and-too-low-pitched voices. So the comic books remain highly, highly potent. Plus, over the years, they've become increasingly prophetic. Much of what maligned Watterson through his 20s and 30s feels like it’s been blooming like a grey cloud. No wonder after his sudden and surprising retirement he has seemingly spent his 40s, 50s, and now 60s with his family—painting pictures he doesn’t share or post, declining every interview request, and steering well clear of any kind of public or online existence. His strips serve as brain jostles. Pokes in the dark. They haven't aged a bit! Like where Calvin is wearing pyjamas standing in front of his TV holding a bowl in the first panel saying “Oh greatest of the mass media, thank you for elevating emotion, reducing thought, and stifling imagination” before continuing in the second “Thank you for the artificiality of quick solutions and for the insidious manipulation of human desires for commercial purposes” before bowing down with the bowl in front of him in the third panel saying “This bowl of lukewarm tapioca represents my brain. I offer it in humble sacrifice. Bestow thy flickering light forever.” A final panel shows his mom in her nightie with bleary eyes staring at the flashing TV in the middle of the night. Um, indeed. Ever-illuminating. Ever-wondrous. Worth being read again ... and again ... and again. (P.S. If you haven’t read it I recommend Bill's ​1990 Commencement speech​ to Kenyon College—to my knowledge the only public speech he's ever done.)

6. ​Raising Calm Kids in a World of Worry: Tools to Ease Anxiety and Overwhelm​ by Ashley Graber and Maria Evans. And now it’s time for a “Leslie’s Pick” where we feature a book recently read and loved by my beautiful wife, Leslie. Over to her! “There’s a real buzz of anxiety and worry in the world right now. With AI, political headlines, and climate doom, parents have a lot to stress over—both in our everyday reality and in our long term guiding of our children. We all know there’s no such thing as ‘perfect parenting’ and Graber and Evans's writing is warm and accessible as they share concrete strategies to develop psychological safety for children using an acronym called SAFER (Set the tone, Allow feelings to guide behaviours, Form identity, Engage like a pro, Role model). They also outline for parents how to understand our child’s worry and place it in context of what’s developmentally normal as well as when to get extra help. Full of relatable stories about real life current day families and unlike many parenting books that just make me feel like there’s more to do, this is a calming, comforting support on the honourable, challenging, and ever-rewarding journey of parenting in today’s demanding times!”

7. “​The World Porn Made​” by Sophie Gilbert. Not a book! But a long 10-page feature article that will stop you in your tracks. I was walking through the Orlando airport last week after missing my flight when I picked up the current issue of The Atlantic. A few flips in came this astounding feature by Sophie Gilbert who takes a from-outer-space view of pornography’s impact on culture over the past 50 years from VCRs to Trump’s latest retweet. I am 45—just 3 years older than the author—and she completely nails the social zeitgeist I grew up in, too. One that starts at the dawn of the millennium when “Britney Spears appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone lying on a pink bed wearing polka-dot panties and a black push-up bra, clutching a Teletubby doll” in the swirl of Best Picture-winner ​American Beauty​ where “a middle-aged man has florid sexual fantasies about his teenage daughter’s best friend” and the introduction of the Abercrombie & Fitch holiday catalog which featured “nude photo spreads, sly references to oral sex and threesomes, and an interview with porn actress Jenna Jameson, in which she was repeatedly harangued by the interviewer to let him touch her breasts.” What’s the lesson she and her friends pick up? That their power was sexual. Flash forward a couple decades and ​Roe v. Wade​ is overturned and now we have Gilbert, post-pandemic, post-kids, looking back and observing how porn has “changed our culture, and, in doing so, has filtered into our subconscious minds, beyond the reach of rationality and reason.” In 1985 Americans rented 75 million adult videos. In 1995 that number was 750 million. Performers from Madonna to Snoop Dogg to The Weeknd were quick to cash in by starring in pornographic offerings and technology was often reverse engineered based on demands from porn. “Google Images was created after Jennifer Lopez wore a vivid-green jungle-print Versace dress to the 2000 Grammy Awards, cut so spectacularly low that it became the most popular search query Google had seen to date. Facebook was born in 2004, after Mark Zuckerberg first experimented with making a website dedicated to assessing the relative hotness of Harvard undergraduates. And when Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steve Chen founded YouTube in 2005, it was partly because Karim had been searching for videos of Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’ at the Super Bowl and couldn’t easily find one.” She catalogs what we did to people—from underage women in ‘Girls Gone Wild’ tapes to Pamela Anderson’s illegally stolen-from-her-locked-bedroom-safe-and-released honeymoon sex tape to Jennifer Ringley, college nerd and first ‘cam girl’ of Jennicam to VP-candidate Sarah Palin who, after her nomination, had lookalikes hired by Larry Flynt off Craigslist to shoot a pornographic film in 10 days called Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?. It’s scary how the algorithm’s thirst for endless extremes to get eyeballs is what’s driven culture. In 2001 in The Guardian Martin Amis ​wrote about the business of porn​ and said that “The new element is violence.” Perhaps the most horrifying takeaways come today when the author discusses elements of the campaign against Kamala Harris that are honestly too shocking for me to even write here. I struggle with pornography’s deep intertwining relationship in our culture. I’m raising kids. I worry about what they’ll see, when they’ll see it, how to keep them safe—how to keep them sane. For fathers, for mothers, for sisters, for brothers, this is an illuminating light on our culture with the goal, the hopeful goal, of seeing it and observing it, so we may rid ourselves of the mask, and then discuss and engage with it in an open and healthier way. I’ve had a subscription to The Atlantic off and on for decades and just renewed it. They've been independent for 168 years! It started with Thoreau writing about abolitionism! I applaud their dedication to longform journalism, I crave their deep research in an era of the sound bite, and I have loved recent featured articles and short stories from people like ​Jonathan Haidt​, Anne Applebaum, and ​George Saunders​. ​Click here to read this article (via a gift link)​ and ​click here to join me with a subscription​.

8. ​Fifty Ideas For Building Better Cities: The Monocle Companion​. Maybe six or seven years ago my neighbour Jason and I went up and down the street and knocked on doors to collect fifty signatures on a homemade letter which we gave to our city councillor who presented it to Toronto City Council. Six weeks later we had speed bumps installed on our street and our kids only needed to beware of cars going 30 or 40km/hour instead of 60 or 70. I am slightly embarrassed that this was probably my first form of civic activism. I liked it! Since then I’ve helped get traffic lights installed, repaired dangerous sidewalks, and helped ​beautify corners​. I haven’t done much—praise be to mayors and councillors!—but I’m learning how easy it is to be helpful on a small scale. Sometimes international and national news stories can feel just way above our abilities to do anything. But we can read neighbourhood signs, talk to interesting people we meet (like ​Doug​, ​Soyoung​, or ​Nickisha​), and send in ​protest letters​. What helps? This book! I bought it last year from the Monocle Store on College Street West in downtown Toronto (​one of six Monocle stores​ globally with the others in London, Zürich, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and Tokyo). And I love Monocle’s ethos of graphic design, culture, and travel together with their philosophy of being totally off social media and instead focusing on very human and analog-y outputs of ​print​, ​radio​, ​books​, and ​newsletters​. So what’s in the book? 50 loosely held-together ideas presented in accessibly tart essays which include “#12 Playgrounds for change” (“Residents should be annoyed if a crude graffiti tag appears on a new slide. They need to care if teenagers start littering a playground floor”) to “#19 The sensory city” (“The membrane of touchpoints and details that connect us to urban life on the surface—planting, seating, music, games—are being value-engineered out of existence”) to “#21 A Sky full of plants” (“Gustavo Gandini, a professor of animal genetics at the University of Milan, is tending to a lavender bush on his abundantly green seventh-floor terrace”). Some essays are lyrical like the four-page gem “#25 Why we need city laureates,” some articulate truths you may have felt before like “#31 The pedestrian manifesto,” and others provoke imagination and energy like “#34 Every city needs a fairground.” I like this book because it makes civic activism and political change feel … accessible. We can’t call the President but we can call our locals! We can protest! We can. We should. Sometimes, honestly, if you’re inclined to help then the old adage to “Think Global and Act Local” still applies. Whether it’s picking up trash at the park, joining a local group asking for change, or just collecting signatures for a set of speed bumps or a traffic light, this book offers a set of spurs and inspiration to help.

9. Nine! There is no nine. Just a little diary entry and some links. I've been in Airplane Mode lately. Suddenly everyone's having a conference! San Diego, Nashville, Dallas, Houston, Wichita, and Orlando ... in two weeks. In Orlando I spoke to 1500 911 (and ​999​!) operators about research-backed ways to take care of our mental health so we can show up for others. I shared ​many​ ​things​ ​you’ve​ ​heard​ ​me​ ​talk​ ​about​ before including, of course, reading ​2 pages of fiction​ before bed. (​46% of us read 0 books in the past year​.) I wrote down ‘​19 Things I Would Tell Myself At Age 19​’ and slipped in a fun walk with ​Nickisha the Dog Walker​—who walks 100km a week! I enjoyed ​this new conversation​ between Jonathan Haidt and Ezra Klein on the status of the phone-free childhood. Btw, Jon’s book, ‘​The Anxious Generation,​’ just hit a year straight on the New York Times bestseller list since it came out. My review is ​here​ and my favorite pages ​here​ and ​here​. As AI quickly soaks into everything at its endlessly dizzying pace I found some comfort in the ideas in Mat Balez's wonderful essay “​Parenting for superintelligence​.” The woodpeckers are ​fighting back​. Karen W. let me know that Little Free Library just opened its ​200,000th book box​! Are you ​high agency or low agency​? You've heard of ​slow productivity​; now it's time for ​slow travel​. ​Great article ​on developing a deep reading habit. Eric Jorgenson asks “​What guest will you listen to on ANY podcast?​” Gladwell ​twitter-punches​. Dan Go reminds us ​health doesn't have to be hard​. NNT gets ​corrected by Community Notes​. What TikTok execs ​say about TikTok​. I thought Mark Carney was ​thanking me​ for a second! (Though I agree with the other Neil.) And may we always remember: We can't do it alone. Thank you for reading to the end. Thank you for being here. ​It really does take a village.​

Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - March 2025

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

We’re still reading!

Trying, anyway. Even ​two pages​ a night helps! Peeling ourselves off screens an hour before bed lets our pineal gland crank out more melatonin to help us sleep. Less screens, more books!

I love the replies you sent me on last month's book club like from Melissa C who wrote:

Your Bookclub refreshes me. I find new books, I share your thoughts on old favourites; and many of your reviews push me to read a book I have known about but for no known reason avoided (I’m ready for ​H is for Hawk​ now!). The Little House on the Prairie series got me through the pandemic. I listened to Cherry Jones read the series via my library app, and it took me away from my worries and anxieties…

I’ll check out Cherry Jones! And I’m hearing a lot of you using library apps like ​Libby​. I do prefer paper, I admit—but all reading is reading! Keep the recos coming. Like this from Casey F:

Apologies if these were in an episode of ​3 Books​ (I am so far behind!), but have you ever read any of the ​Mrs. Piggle Wiggle​ books? They're old fashioned, feature lots of different bratty-but-normal kids, and Mrs. Piggle Wiggle is amazing and also a little nuts. PS Read one of the original 4, by Betty MacDonald, not “Happy Birthday, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle” which was completed by her daughter and isn't quite the same.

I haven’t! But now I will add it to my skyscraper-high TBR. I also love hearing your reading stories like from Lidia M:

Dear Neil, I developed a love of reading early in life, I could see the scenes in my head and dreamed the stories at night. The characters peopled my life with vivid images of exotic lives outside of my own and fueled my imagination. I read voraciously. Now, later in life I have little time for devouring books but your reviews inspire me to read and pull me back to when this was so possible. Something I anticipate returning to. Thank you for contributing to keeping this alive for me...

And you for me! Reading isn’t always easy so we need each other’s encouragement. Keep it coming! Just reply to this email anytime…

Now let’s hit the books!

Neil

P.S. Invite others to join us ​here​.

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1. ​Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World​ by Anne Applebaum (b. 1964). What is going on in the world right now? There’s an incessant rubber-mallet-to-the-forehead quality in the news. The zone is officially flooded and the overwhelming quantity of cheap misinformation together with the proliferation of bots, trolls, and AI-backed spammers manipulating the algorithms (who are incentivized to feed us anything to draws us in!) threatens to destabilize reality and obscure what’s really happening. This tiny and powerful book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum zooms up and above the daily “whats” and gives us the more illuminating and horrifying “whys” and “hows.” From page 27: “Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead.” And yet they have! Deeply so. In the first of 5 compressed and highly detailed chapters she writes: “The globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance the democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.” I mean: I remember going on Twitter a decade ago when some big event was happening—the Oscars, the World Series, a big political announcement—and I’d hit the ‘For You’ feed and it was this beautiful cacophony of voices. Now it’s bogged down by unreliable spam. And it’s not just Twitter but most places. I learned in this book that in Central and South America the most common news is Chinese. Chinese news! China is one of a growing number of countries making up “Autocracy Inc” and we learn in Chapter 3 on “Controlling the narrative” how deep the surveillance goes. From page 69 we learn how China requires all Uighur muslims to download

...nanny apps on their phones which constantly search for ‘ideological viruses,’ including Koranic verses and religious references as well as suspicious statements in all forms of correspondence. The apps can monitor purchases of digital books and track an individual’s location, sending the information back to police. They can also pick up unusual behavior: anyone who downloads a virtual private network, anyone who stays off-line altogether, and anyone whose home uses too much electricity (which could be evidence of a secret houseguest) can arouse suspicion. Voice-recognition technology and even DNA swabs are used to monitor where Uighurs walk, drive, and shop.

But it is just oppressed minorities under dictatorships? Or … all of us? It’s not like the autocracies—defined as governments where one person possess unlimited power—are doing the twentieth century thing of pretending they’re giving us utopias. No, on page 74, Applebaum writes that the “…propagandists of Autocracy, Inc., have learned from the mistakes … they don’t offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and they don’t inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, because there is no better world to build.” The decline in power of international organizations—like NATO, the WHO, and International Courts—reduces accountability for autocratic nations to suffer any kind of retribution for breaking global laws. Before our incoming ​Prime Minister Mark Carney​ took office a couple weeks ago we saw him resign from private boards and put his personal assets in blind trust to avoid conflict of interests. Contrast this to Presidents selling private crypto-coins or shilling cars from White House lawn. “Come on down!” Language is of course emerging as a battleground. I read with horror about the ​Newspeak​ emerging as words such as ​‘inclusivity,’ ‘mental health,’ and ‘activism’ are being phased out​. Don’t say those words! Can’t say those words! From page 102:

To protect its sovereignty, China seeks to change other kinds of language too. Instead of ‘political rights’ or ‘human rights’, the Chinese want the UN and other international organizations to talk about win-win cooperation—by which they mean that everyone will benefit if each country maintains its own political system. They also want to popularize mutual respect—by which they mean that no one should criticize anyone else.

These words are getting inserted into UN documents and “if mutual respect, win-win cooperation, and sovereignty prevail, then there is no role for human rights advocates, international commissions of inquiry, or any public criticism of Chinese policy in Tibet, Hong Kong, or Xinjiang at all.” Chapter 4 on “Smearing the democrats” shows how reputations in the era of social media overwhelm are taken down by anyone trying to fight for freedom and democracy. Why? Because as Anne writes on page 142 “when something ‘secret’ is revealed about an activist or political figure, perhaps through the publication of a taped conversation or a hacked email, it creates an impression that the person is dishonest and has something to hide, even when the tape or the hacked email contains no evidence of wrongdoing.” This book was published just before the US election of 2024 and there is an ominous close where Anne reminds us on page 148 that Trump seeks to “stoke anger and even violence against people he dislikes, including federal judges” and that “If he ever succeeds in directing federal courts and law enforcement at his enemies, in combination with a mass trolling campaign, then the blending of the autocratic and democratic worlds will be complete.” Is there hope? I mean—yes, thankfully. The closing chapter is a call to arms for people to rise up and fight through legal means the growing autocracy. It’s not easy. But it starts with books. Peeling ourselves off ad-based algorithms full of misinformation wired to confuse us—and getting back into books like this accessible and fearless writeup by a super-articulate history-based Pulitzer-prize winning Yale, LSE, and Oxford-educated journalist. She’s got the chops and she’s breathtakingly fearless in calling spades spades. This is a wake-up call we owe it to ourselves to read, share, and pass along. Highly recommended.

2. ​Crooked Plow: A Novel​ by Itamar Vieira Junior (b. 1979). The Atlantic slave trade lasted nearly 400 years from the early 1500s to the late 1800s with over 12 million Africans shipped to toil in plantations across the Americas. The number is actually far higher than 12 million because so many people died en route or upon arriving. (As an aside, the most vivid description of slave ships I’ve read is in the phenomenal novel ‘​The Book of Negroes​’ by ​Lawrence Hill​.) I didn’t know Brazil is where the *first* slave ships went, the *most* slaves went (nearly half the 12 million), and the *last* slave ships went—with slavery abolished there in 1888. But what is abolished? As Vieira Junior writes through a character on page 170: “My father, she went on, was born almost thirty years after enslaved Blacks had been declared free, when in reality they were still captives of the descendants of their grandparents’ masters.” This is a transporting 276-page novel almost entirely taking place in a camp on a plantation in Northeastern Brazil from early to late twentieth century. It is told in three sweeping chunks by three different narrators. In the first pages a seven-year-old girl named Bibiana and her sister find a knife under their grandmothers’ bed and tragedy ensues with one girl accidentally slicing off her tongue. The writing ingeniously hides what really happened to whom until the second part of the book begins with the story told and expanded upon from the other sister’s perspective. A haunting, fly somewhere far-far-away novel that takes you deep into mud huts on the Água Negra plantation. You feel like you’re there: in the backbreaking labor while “pressing palm oil” and “peeling buriti” and navigating puberty and tragedy and oppression and violence and love. The title of the book is revealed on page 179 through the voice of the tongue-less character: “… the sound that came from my mouth was an aberration, chaotic, as if the severed chunk of my tongue had been replaced by a hard-boiled egg. My voice was a crooked plow, deformed, penetrating the soil only to leave it infertile, ravaged, destroyed.” If you liked ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ by Zora Neale Hurston (​2/2018​) you’ll love this, too. With some pepper shakes of magic realism and an endlessly floaty vibe that leaves you feeling like you’re on a boat. I was sent the book from my friend ​Wagner Moura​ (​Civil War​, ​Elite Squad​) who called it a “beautiful book with strong social criticism and depiction of injustices in poor rural areas.” Published in 2018 and translated into English in 2023 this book won *all three* of Brazil’s top literary prizes.

3. ​The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide To Design Your Dream Life​ by Sahil Bloom. I struggled to write this review. This book is good. Really good! Did we expect anything less from Sahil (“SA-hill”) Bloom, *the* Sahil Bloom, the potentially most optimized person I’ve ever met, with his ​six-pack of steel​, his membership to the Core Club in Manhattan (where he’s the youngest member), his double-Stanford pedigree (which he jokes in the book and other spots doesn’t keep up with his Yale sister, ​Harvard dad​, and Princeton mom, who still encourages him, to this day, to “try for medical school” (page 5)). Even his haircut is “​intimidating​”—according to Susan Cain, who makes a wonderful wisdom-drenched cameo on page 229 in a two-pager co-written with Sahil titled, somewhat unSusanny, “​Mental Hacks I Wish I Knew At Twenty-Two​.” I mean, the man ​wakes up at 4am every day​ to take a televised ice bath. He is OPTIMIZED. I picture him discussing one-legged Romanian Deadlift angles and best brands of organic avocado oil in a group chat with Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferriss, and Bryan Johnson. And big respect to all those guys—it’s not easy being so public, pushing yourself, pushing our understanding of how hard pushing is possible. Just for me I … didn’t quite connect with the book the way I expected to and way I often do with Sahil’s wonderful email newsletter ​The Curiosity Chronicle​. On page 7 Sahil writes: “I was thirty years old and making millions of dollars.” And right away it’s like—um, that’s a tough place to connect. He confesses right afterwards that “…the feelings of happiness and fulfillment I expected were nowhere to be found.” We know this! We hear this everywhere. Money doesn’t make you happy! Just that most of us would like the millions of dollars first—you know, just to be sure. Unfulfilled workaholic twentysomething multimillionaire? This is your bible! He speaks, like we all do I suppose, to the me-of-yesteryear. I guess for me that super left-brainy, quantitative, systems-everything guy is still in there, for sure … just a bit distant. I think I kept wanting to *feel* the book more—in my gut, in my heart. But it just kind of put its feet up in my left brain. I like my left brain! I have sticker charts and trackers up the wazoo. But I also think I read, partly, to get away from that, to tone down that side of myself, to enter places of greater vastness and spirit and soul. As ever: right book, right time. And I do think this book will catch people—like it caught famed billionaire investor ​Bill Ackman​, who Sahil shares he reached out to over Twitter for lunch years ago, or billionaire Apple CEO ​Tim Cook​, who Sahil shares he met while working out regularly in a gym in SF at 4am (“There are no losers in the gym at 4:45 AM,” he says). It’ll catch people who maybe need to chill more? Need to call their mom more, need to get outside more, need to sleep more … need to think about money *less*. In some sense this book feels like you fed every uber-popular self-help book (like those that’ve sold >5 million copies) and every uber-popular self-help viral tweet or LinkedIn post (those that’ve been viewed >5 million times) and you stirred, stirred, stirred them together in a big yellow bowl before pouring that chunky batter into muffin-cup chapters and baked it all into something moist and delightfully chunk-free. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s incredibly hard to do this! I’m just saying that if you’ve read the genre widely then you probably read about the Eisenhower Matrix (pages 96-97) in ‘​The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People​’; the history of Parkinson’s Law (pages 100-101) in ‘​The Happiness Equation​’ and, let’s be honest, before that in ‘​The 4-Hour Workweek​’ (and, before that, probably in ‘​Getting Things Done​’ by David Allen); and you probably saw Benjamin Franklin’s ‘daily calendar’ (pages 115-116) in … ‘​The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin​.’ If you’ve been online a lot you’ve probably seen the viral ​Ikigai graphic​ (pages 212-213), heard the ​Steve Jobs commencement speech​ (pages 216-217), and heard many versions of famous Joseph Heller “I’ve got something he can never have … enough” story (pages 313-314) a few places. But, of course, those pieces have gone viral for a reason, and finding them all, bringing them together, is no small feat. This is a book full of “life productivity techniques.” Not getting more done, but maximizing yourself on all the scales. On page 55 he encourages everyone to sit down and write a letter to their future selves. This is the kind of thing I want to do, and maybe should do—but it’s hard. It helps that Sahil generously shares the letter he wrote to himself in 2014 at age 23 which includes lines like “You have a lot you hide from the world. You’re insecure. You compare yourself to everyone but yourself.” and “I hope you live closer to your family” and “I hope you’re working on something that feels meaningful.” Now he his! And you love him for it, for finding and following his dream. He details in the opening chapter a story that feels like Tim Urban’s “​The Tail End​”—about how a friend told him given he only sees his east coast parents once a year, and they’re in their mid-sixties, he’ll only see them 15 more times in his life. Of course, some of the examples on how to correct this, are … kind of funny. Like on page 37, when ​Sahil discusses Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph's sturdy rule for himself​. What’s the sturdy rule? Every Tuesday night Marc makes sure work is “wrapped up by five” so he can have dinner with his wife. He developed the system after working “eighty hour weeks.” I mean, on one hand, sure. But on the other hand, who the heck is working 7am to 7pm for 7 days a week—so much so they need to calendar in a weekly dinner with their wife? I’d resonate more with the story if it was the other way: tracking nights away from dinner with your family, which feels like the more obvious expected baseline. But I do agree: if you never have dinner with your wife scheduling one a week is a good start! Sahil is an eager and hard-working disciple and distiller and his efforts come through. In this 369-page book, stuffed to the absolute brim with tools, models, “razors,” quotes, and heuristics, you will likely find one thing, perhaps many things, that you can reliably and valuably apply to improve your life. This man has the steepest learning curve, the steepest output curve, and one of the sharpest minds of anyone I know. He's in his early thirties and I know will be someone to follow for decades. I can't wait to see what he gives us in 5 years, 10 years, and beyond.

4. ​What An Owl Knows: The New Science Of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds​ by Jennifer Ackerman (b. 1959). A couple months ago my friend ​Scott​ and I were traipsing through knee-deep snow in -20C/-4F weather just after sunrise way, way out on the ​Leslie Spit​—an ancient garbage pile poking into Lake Ontario that’s since evolved into a bird paradise—when we suddenly saw a ​Long-Eared Owl​ glowering at us. Scott snapped a picture, we stepped backwards, one of us stepped on a stick that cracked and just like that the bird was gone. But what a picture he nabbed!

I don’t see owls very often. None of us do! That word “enigmatic” is so perfect—“hard to understand or explain, inscrutable or mysterious” according to Merriam Webster—when describing these 60-million-year-old (!) birds. For reference, Home Sapiens have been around 300,000 years and Homo Erectus were about 1.5 million years ago. Said another way: This planet belongs to the owls. We just live here! What an intoxicating and never-ending pleasure of trivia this book is as we follow the warm and sagacious Jennifer Ackerman through her pilgrimage to better understand these fascinating birds. From page xvii: “Why do an owl’s eyes, alone in the bird world, face the same way ours do? What made the early ancestors of owls cross the boundary into night?... How are owls adapting to shifts in their habitat and global climate?” First up! Where did they come from. Well, “like all birds, they initially arose from a group of small, mostly predatory, running dinosaurs that were coexisting with other, larger dinosaurs sixty-six million years ago.” The trivia is endless: “Of the 11,000 or so species of birds alive today, only 3 percent have adaptations that allow for stalking prey in the dark.” Feathered talons help! As do satellite dome faces! And the ability to hear a mouse running under a foot of snow! We learn on page 90 that “if a nesting ​Great Horned Owl​ is threatened by a dog or other predator, it will fluff up its feathers and throw itself to the ground, flapping around as if its wing is injured and squealing once or twice…” and on page 91 that “owlets begin vocalizing in the egg, even before they hatch.” Btw, did you know Great Horned Owls consume over *500* species? From shrews to rats to jackrabbits to ducks to ferrets to foxes to skunks! (They don’t smell skunks like pretty much everything else making them the only predator for most skunks, which are 3 times as heavy!) WATCH OUT EVERYTHING! I love this book. It’s owl trivia forever. From “Female ​Snowy Owls​ choose to breed only with males that are really white” (page 126) to the fact that ​Burrowing Owls​ decorate their nests which chunks of concrete decorations or “122 pieces of coyote scat” (page 132) to problematic issues like Japan’s “owl cafés” (page 213) or The Hedwig Problem, where Harry Potter created a bit of a global boom on illegal owls as pets. Quiet, mysterious, ever-hidden, ever-lurking, this is a wonderfully curious and scientific look into the 254 species of owls we share the planet with.

5. ​Birds​ by Kevin Henkes, illustrated by Laura Dronzek. Another book about birds but this one takes about 1/10,000th the time to read. A little girl looks out her window and describes birds from the simplest possible lens—but with enough little a-has that give the book angles and wonder. Like a quick scene when she says she sees birds sitting still on a wire for a long time and then looks back and they’re all gone or when she sees birds all take off and it looks like the tree is sneezing. Great one for your tiniest! Have it read-a-loud to you on YT ​right here​.

6. ​Useful Not True​ by Derek Sivers. I remember way back in 2010 when I was working in Leadership Development at Walmart and this little 5 minute TED Talk went viral internally called “​How To Start A Movement​.” I loved it! All about the leadership of “first follower” as told through a hill of people dancing at a music festival. It was vintage ​Derek Sivers​, though I didn’t know who Derek was at the time—with his unique blend of poetic wisdom distilled, distilled, distilled down into simple parts. The man is obsessed with simplifying! He let me use his wonderfully distilled “​horse fable​” in the Introduction to ‘​You Are Awesome​,’ my book on resilience, and I remember when his personal website was at sivers.org but he must have thought that URL was too flabby because he got it from 10 characters to 7 with ​sive.rs​. (Btw, bookmark his “​Book Notes​” over there—a wonderful summary of what he’s read.) Now comes his newest book! Another slim self-published hardcover that in 88 pages takes us from “Almost Nothing People Say Is True” to “Your Thoughts Aren’t True” to “Ideas Can Be Useful, Not True” to “Adopt What Works For You.” He makes the simple point over and over: we make stuff up. That’s how we live. We adopt beliefs, we tell ourselves stories, we create realities that aren’t true—but they help us navigate through life. So, given that, we may as well make up things that help us. The idea reminds me of a familiar refrain in Cheryl Strayed’s ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ (​10/2020​)—that we should let go what isn’t serving us and adopt beliefs or behaviors that do. Ironically, even though Derek’s the king of simple and short writing, I did feel like I could glean the entire takeaway of this book through the chapter headlines. But for me this is a reminder book: something to set on your shelf, and face outwards, when you find yourself stuck chasing a dream or a wish or an ideal that … maybe doesn’t help you? A ”from first principles” book that’s useful to reduce guilt, inspire direction, or get unstuck.

7. ​Slowness: A Novel​ by Milan Kundera (1929-2023). I read this whole novel and am not exactly sure what just happened. I heard it described as the “most accessible” of the famed exiled Czech novelist’s works and, uh, well, now I’m scared of the rest. This is the first novel Kundera wrote in French and it’s a completely disjointed narration of a midsummer’s night with a series of abstract tales of seduction—centuries apart!—all woven together. Modern art! Hard to follow! But punctuated with moments of such clairvoyant poignancy that I alternated between frustration and delight. From page 3:

Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature?

I like that. This is my kind of guy! A wanderer of hills, a lover of nature. And then he keeps going:

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through speeds up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him at times

I learned that this particular paragraph was part of Carl Honoré’s inspiration to write the wonderful ‘In Praise of Slowness’ (​5/2020​), which I’m revisiting these days. A confusing, poignant, flowing funny, and genuinely weird book.

8. ‘​The Anti-Social Century​’ by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. Do you think that spending time on social media is… social? I know it is *social* media, but is it social the way The Olive Garden is Italian? If you think it's social, you will disagree with the thesis of this article which begins at a restaurant that permanently closes its bar after Covid and evolves into ​Robert Putnam​-like analysis of key figures, variables, and metrics that seem to be accelerating both our loneliness pandemic and our left brain’s desire to always be alone. But our hearts and our bodies desire to be together … To hang out with friends. One key chart:

We went inside for the pandemic... and we didn't come out! Is that a problem? Yup! As Thompson writes (and the bold is mine):

...people who spend more time alone, year after year, become meaningfully less happy. In his 2023 paper on the rise of 21st-century solitude, Atalay, at the Philadelphia Fed, calculated that by one measure, sociability means considerably more for happiness than money does: A five-percentage-point increase in alone time was associated with about the same decline in life satisfaction as was a 10 percent lower household income. Nonetheless, many people keep choosing to spend free time alone, in their home, away from other people.

Not all surprising, but still shocking. The conclusion is after reading this book club—and thank you for being here—call your mom, call your dad, call your sister, call your brother, call your friends, or call your neighbors … make some plans for tonight! One new thing we're trying at home is FFF. It's “Family and Friends Friday,” at our house, every Friday. Every member of the family can bring somebody over for dinner. It's always a crazy concoction of people and seems to be helping us provoke more human-to-human friendships.

9. There is no 9! Just our regular lootbag of links. I transcribed 91-year-old former Canadian Prime Minister's ​recent speech about this moment​. I posted my review of ‘The Let Them Theory’ ​over on LinkedIn​. Smart phones ​are bad for boys too​. David Perell on ​what's broken in education​. Jefferson Fisher on Mel Robbins' show ​about communicating confidently​. Lindyman on ​re-inventing yourself in the US and how it's harder elsewhere​. I love ​George Saunders​ and ​his recent Substack post was terrific​. A polluted Ontario creek ​is bouncing back​. Bryan Johnson's ​new morning routine​. Nick Cave on ​spiteful comments and friendship​. And if you made it this far check out my recent chat with ​Emily Nagoski​. Thanks for reading all the way to the end!

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - February 2025

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

This is the 100th issue of my monthly book club.

I emailed you the first issue back in November 2016 and have sent another on the last Saturday of every month since.

The goal remains the same! To inspire us both to read. Books, specifically. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it's hard! Attention remains the battleground. The more extreme, more violent, more shocking—the more it'll be firehosed at our faces. We know what to do—

—but that doesn't mean it's easy. Still: the richest pleasures lie way down in the deep. I talked about that ​with Lindyman this month​. What lasts a long time will last a long time more. Family, friends, togetherness, time in nature, good walks, good food, good books.

This month let's fall into screenless Middle-earth in ‘The Fellowship of the Ring,’ connect with endangered species leaving us in ‘Last Chance to See,’ and master the ancient art of falconry with Helen Macdonald in ‘H is for Hawk.’ Of course, while reading these books I fell into attention-splintering holes. But the goal is never to be perfect. Just a little better than before.

Let's keep inspiring each other to read—just a little more.

Thank you for your attention.

I value it sacredly.

Neil

P.S. Invite others to join us ​here​.

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1. ​The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring ​by J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973). My first exposure to The Lord of The Rings was through the 2001-2003 Peter Jackson trilogy which I saw down by the lake at Whitby’s fancy new AMC 24 theaters. Then when the movies came out on DVD my friends and I would watch the “Director’s Cut” versions and enjoy the side-plots while reciting some of the lines. (“These men are thirsty—bring them some mead!”). Back then I remember the Shire feeling cozy, the black riders terrifying, and the flying cameras through ​the mines of Moria​ thrilling. The first book in the trilogy looked ... thick. It was written in 1954. And since I loved the films I decided to chalk it up as "optional." That changed in 2019 when I spent a wild afternoon hanging out with ​Kevin The Bookseller​ in his tiny Indigo bookshop in the lobby of Mount Sinai hospital. Kevin is an incredible bookseller popular with staff and readers. Pinch in on his moustache!

In addition to ‘The Twits’ by Roald Dahl (​7/2020​) and ‘The Power of Habit’ by Charles Duhigg, Kevin decisively declared the entire LOTR trilogy as formative—and told us he was currently reading it to his kids. Well, thanks to Kevin, I spent the past eight months reading this 423-page 5-point font vintage copy of ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ and, uh, it took a while. But now The Shire has expanded from cozy to … mystical, magical, and complicated with so many twisted family histories over so many years. The black riders have grown from terrifying to … mythological, ethereal, ominous, ever-lurking. And the mines of Moria have expanded from thrilling to… dark, dismal, distressing. And the songs! So many songs. Brought to life with poetic and literary flair by ​Tolkien The Philogist​ (who once worked for the Oxford English Dictionary on, specifically, the letter W!), from so many characters, from so many backgrounds. I admit at multiple points my son screamed “I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON!”, and I felt the same way—I mean it gets dense—but it just has this floating ferry-ship feeling that rolls and rolls and rolls and rolls and you feel like you're living real-time with grand moments peppered between much longer moments of pause, confusion, or rest. The story is well-known: The Dark Lord created "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them," but oh crap—the ring got chopped off his finger! Then Gollum got it! Then Bilbo—back in ‘The Hobbit.’ (​8/2022​). And now from Bilbo to Frodo, who is tasked with throwing it back into the fires in Mordor where the thing was made. But the story is small here: it's the lessons learned on the way. From page 69 of my 1977 “Authorized Canadian Edition” after Frodo says Gollum deserves death for what he has done Gandalf retorts: “Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” On page 294 after the grim Council of Elrond we hear from Gimli: Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.” There is so much more texture here with endless descriptions that sound like paintings and long histories that make you want to draw out family trees. This is a big book that, if you're me and my son, you spend a long time with. I don't recommend reading it out loud but I do recommend reading it. Maybe the just-under-23hrs version on ​Libro​ or ​Audible​! (I have no affiliation with either but use Libro since ​Latanya and Jerry of Bronx Bound Books​ told us about it. I like that you can steer the audiobook profits to the indie bookstore of your choice.)

2. ​The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions Of People Can’t Stop Talking About ​by Mel Robbins (b. 1968). I love Mel Robbins. I’ve said this maybe … 90 times? … in the 9 years since I met her ​back at Caesar's Palace​. That’s not a lot considering how many times I’ve heard others saying it: giant ballrooms full of people standing after a big motivational speech, people scrolling in headphones beside me on airplanes smiling at one of Mel’s sassy ​Instagram pep talks​, or even my mother-in-law who took Mel’s suggestion years ago to sign up for the ​‘Growth Day’ app​ and who still faithfully checks in with it every morning for inspiration. Mel has this old-friend-at-your-kitchen-table knack for stirring the 1000 most common English words into something that feels akin to a slap-in-the-face followed by a hug. She never says she’s invented the tools she shares but breaks them down, down, down into simple, almost molecular, lessons which she brings to life with stories. Like the time she bought her son’s date a corsage for high school prom and after he said he didn’t want to take it and after Mel’s older daughter whispered to Mel that they didn’t really know each other super well Mel just, y’know, decided to hide the corsage in her purse, take it to the prom photo shoot, and … give it to the date anyway! While telling the date that her son didn't want her to do this. Ummm. Is your face contorted into something between crying and laughing? Mine too. Mel continues: “And that’s when I noticed she had made her own corsage, which she was already wearing on one of her wrists. [My daughter] Kendall rolled her eyes. [My husband] Chris shifted. If I could have evaporated in that moment, I would have.” And then you’re back on her team. Because can’t we all relate to a bunch of stupid and humiliating things we did? Of course we can. After the photo shoot it begins pouring and Mel is horrified at her son’s clothes getting soaked and the fact he and his friends don’t have reservations and want to take their dates to a cheap Mexican spot. When she begins to interfere again her daughter chimes in: “Mom, if Oakley and his friends want to go to a taco bar for pre-prom, LET THEM … (“But it’s too small for all of them to fit in and they’ll get soaked”) … LET THEM get soaked … (“But his new sneakers are going to get ruined!”) … LET THEM get ruined.” And now you know the Let Them Theory! But what seems braindead obvious isn’t necessarily. I mean, how often do you find yourself overly involved, worried, stressed, or upset at something somebody else said or did? Pretty damn often, right! Me too. Everyone too! So we’re meant to use this internal two-word mantra to practice acceptance, let the world keep moving, while then practicing the follow-up mantra—“Let Me”—to affect, change, or improve our own behavior instead. (On page 70 she says “Let Me is an opportunity for you to put your time, energy, and values at the center of your life.”) Like when Mel’s mom's friends all go on a vacation without her and she finds herself doomscrolling in “full stalker mode” she has to remind herself: Let Them. And then Let Me show up and reach out as a better friend than I’ve been over the past few years. Simple, right? Vintage Mel. That’s her straight talking, vulnerable friend-to-millions conversation. She talks openly about the fear of being worried what other people would think (like when she was doing keynote speeches for free but didn't want to post about them) and how to use the theory (and a great tangent called ‘frame of reference’) to work with people especially close to you. She writes about how she grew to understand her mom’s early unhappiness with Mel’s marriage because of what happened to her after she got married—namely moving away from all her family and friends to be with her hubby. I am not surprised this book just became the fastest selling non-fiction book in publishing history. It's talking to people. For scale reference ‘​The Book of Awesome​’ was a New York Times and #1 international bestseller for 3 straight years ... and Mel's book sold more copies in 3 straight weeks. (That would be over 800,000!) Last month I couldn’t even find a copy at any bookstore:

And then when the book came flooding back in-stock the stores had it everywhere. Front displays, front tables, every single cash register:

Why? Because we’re lonely. We’re scared. We’re anxious. We’re imperfect. We need Mel’s guiding, supportive, empowering spirit. She creates such a karmic imbalance in the world by offering so much of herself. You can almost mainline her on ​Instagram​ or ​YouTube​. Millions do! After it didn’t work out being a life coach or CNN radio host or TV Talk Show host she’s found her Big Megaphone with ​The Mel Robbins Podcast​ (often the top-ranked podcast in the world), her ​Instagram feed with its 8.2M followers​, and her series of ​rallying books​. You can honestly flip this book to any page, read a couple minutes, and feel like you just got a personal pep talk. It looks so easy you don't realize it's hard. Mel Robbins: a voice for the rest of us on hard days. P.S. If you want to fall down a Mel rabbit hole here are “​7 Leadership Lessons I Learned from Mel Robbins​” which I wrote 5 years ago and ​our live 3 Books podcast​ together in ​Bryant Park​ 2 years ago.

3. ​Fantastic Mr. Fox​ by Roald Dahl (1916–1990). I’ve been on a ​read-aloud roll​ with my third kid. We did ‘Little House in the Big Woods’ (​4/2024​), ‘Little House in the Prairie’ (​8/2024​), ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ (​8/2024​), and ‘The BFG’ (​11/2024​). Leslie’s been having fun reading him ‘Marge In Charge’ and so I felt it made sense to turn to ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ next which has to be one of the sharpest, tightest stories in the Dahl canon. Mr. Fox steals food every night from Boggis, Bunce, and Bean (“one fat, one short, one lean”) who, you know makes sense, grow frustrated and wage an escalating war on Mr. Fox and his family. Twists, turns, with wonderful illustrations from Donald Chaffin in 1970 or Quentin Blake in 1995:

Thank goodness the ​2023 Puffin censors didn’t get their way in their bizarre attempts​ to remove the word ‘black’ as a tractor descriptor, taking out any references to height and weight, and changing Mr. Fox’s son to a daughter. An absolutely wonderful book and, I will add, I also recommend the 2009 Wes Anderson ​stop-motion film​ of the same name. ​93% on RT​!

4. ​Marge In Charge​ by Isla Fisher (b. 1976). Since I just mentioned ‘Marge’ and have never read it but always hear them giggling and laughing about it I thought I’d shoulder-tap Leslie for a review. Over to you Les: “I’m always looking for opportunities to laugh with our kids. Nothing clears the cobwebs and greases the gears of our relationship like a good laugh (other than also a good cry and snuggle!) and so ‘Marge In Charge’ by Isla Fisher is one of my all-time favorite read-alouds! Not only does it get kids as young as 4 laughing out loud but I find myself cracking up alongside them and it just feels so darn good. Isla Fisher, comedian and actress, wrote these books after having told the stories to her children at bedtime and you can just feel the love, creativity, and spontaneity laced through them. Marge is a rainbow-haired and retired duchess (or so she loves to say!) who falls asleep on the job babysitting Jemima and Jakey. She always somehow finishes all of the jobs on the mom’s list but in the most fantastical hilarious ways. Like when she convinces Jakey, who refuses to wash his hair, to wash his hair in the bubble-flooded bathroom and clean it all up before the parents get home. It’s light and fun and entertaining and I dare you not to laugh with your kids while reading any of the wonderful four books in the series.”

5. ​1000 Hours Outside: Activities To Match Screen Time With Green Time​ by Ginny Yurich. Ginny Yurich wasn’t enjoying motherhood. It was September 2011 and the Michigan mom of three felt exhausted, trapped, pinned down by 12-hour stretches of “crying, screaming, diapers, noses, sweeping, one-handed cooking, and the minutia that accompanies life with little ones.” A friend mentioned that education guru ​Charlotte Mason​ says children should spend 4-6 hours outside a day. “No way,” Ginny thought. “How can anyone do that?” But she didn’t have anything to lose so figured she’d give it a shot. She packed sandwiches and took her kids to a field one morning along with that same friend. “That day changed my life,” she told me. “They played and played. They invented new games. They jumped off logs. They weren’t fighting. And I had my first adult conversation since having kids.” (She found out later this Charlotte person lived in the 1800s!) Anyway, the energy from that day powered Ginny and her husband Josh’s “1000 Hours Outside” movement which has grown from a focus on homeschooling their five kids into a ​viral Instagram feed​, popular ​1000 Hours Outside podcast​, and even little ​coloring sheets​ to help the sticker-chart people among us (hi) track our progress. Which is? 1000 hours outside a year. Simple! Almost 3 hours a day. Tiny compared to our roots but massive compared to the 10-minutes-outside-a-day culture we’ve evolved into. Where does the book come in? Well, it’s a full-color, 287-page flipper offering 136 ideas for outdoor family activities conveniently organized into Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall. From “Hot Chocolate Hikes” (what it sounds like) to “Snow Hot Tubs” (putting on your bathing suit and filling a kiddie pool with hot water in the winter) to “Fairy Doors” (painted cardboard and popsicle stick ‘doors’ to put at the base of tall trees), this is a simple reminder that nature has deep powers and encourages all of us to peel ourselves off the screens.

6. ​All Fours​ by Miranda July (b. 1974). When Leslie and I first moved in together I assumed we would merge bookshelves. I had a paltry 20 or 30 but she had at least a hundred so I thought we could just sort of … sift them together. “What?,” I remember Leslie asking when I mentioned this in passing, “That would be like merging brains. That’s like—who we are. You can’t merge brains. You can't merge bookshelves.” Whoa! Time for a new ​Billy​. But, also, looking back: props. I just hadn’t had that enlightened thought but now I definitely see the importance. Our conjoined shelves are now like vines creeping out of their pots slowly unfurling for extra space anywhere We have bookshelves on two of four walls and now it’s time to build more over the windows and down the other sides behind this picture … I mean, when you start losing the floors you know it's time:

One thing that’s fun when you have two people’s bookshelves in the same room is seeing which books you have ‘doubles’ of. Like pre-merger or post-merger you both decided this book was too important to not to individually own. Right now we have doubles of ‘A Million Little Pieces’ by ​James Frey​, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ by Anne Frank, ‘Influence’ by Robert Cialdini, ‘How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk’ by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, and yes, as of last month, ‘All Fours’ by Miranda July. I admit my copy remains pristine as I got the pleasure of reading Leslie’s copy with her underlines and Post-It notes pasted in it (​read Leslie's 8/2024 review​). The book came to us in different ways. She saw it recommended in ​Cat and Nat's​ ​email newsletter​ and I bought it after getting one of those GoodReads “New Books Out This Month From Authors You Loved” emails and they both arrived before we discussed. Right away I loved the cover blurb from George Saunders: “A giddy, bold, mind-blowing tour de force.” George runs the wonderful ​Story Club​ Substack (I’m a member!) and I love the way he describes ultimate prose as ‘undeniable.’ Like you just could not imagine a sentence or string of sentences being better. Crisper, funnier, zingier? No! You cannot. Because the prose … is undeniable. I’m telling you today that Miranda July may be second only to George himself at the non-existent awards The Undeniable Prosies. She begins wooing us with the first four sentences: “Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a good opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled like this.” Jarringly self-aware, flamboyantly unhinged, unapologetically sexual, subversively funny. The book is a study in how to write a book. The way she constantly unveils our unnamed 45-year-old protagonist’s character to us is astounding. Like when on page 13 she steps away from a chat with her husband and another couple at a party and then … suddenly joins a dance floor?

There was a small group of people dancing in the living room. I moved discreetly at first, getting my bearings, then the beat took hold and I let my vision blur. I fucked the air. All my limbs were in motion, making shapes that felt brand-new. My skirt was tight, my top was sheer, my heels were high. The people around me were nodding and smiling; I couldn’t tell if they were embarrassed for me or actually impressed. The host’s father looked me up and down and winked—he was in his eighties. Was that how old a person had to be to think I was hot these days? I moved deeper into the crowd, shut my eyes, and slid side to side, shoulder first, like I was protecting stolen loot. Now I added a fist like a brawler, punching. I made figure eights with my ass at what felt like an incredible speed while holding my hands straight up in the air...

LOL. And the plot? The narrator starts off from LA on a two-week road trip to New York and back but then stops in a suburb half an hour outside town where she remodels a motel room with a young designer and then seduces her husband who is a hip-hop dancer who works at the local Hertz ... before tipping back into what this all means for her and her marriage. There are scenes in this book I could not believe I was reading. I wasn’t shocked. Too tight a word. More like I found myself out in the middle of a swinging bridge between cliff edges and had to steady myself to stare into the suddenly blinding sun and galing wind. The book swings, sways, shocks, skewers. It's titillating and tantric. I suggest starting with ‘No One Belongs Here More Than You’ (​3/2022)​, her nearly 20-year-old collection of short stories, which was one of the collective formative books from ​Daniel Kwan and Daniel Sheinert​, filmmakers behind ‘​Turn Down For What​’ and ‘​Swiss Army Man​.’ Miranda July writes like nobody else. A strong, fierce, rubber-band brainslap of book.

7. ​H is for Hawk​ by Helen Macdonald (b. 1970). This book has been spying me from bookshelves since it came out in 2015. You too? That hawk—glowering from the shelf!

I had seen that cover so much but finally talon-snared it off the front display at ​Doug Miller Books​ in ​Koreatown​. Looking closer on the cover I see it’s a painting by ​Chris Wormell​ and it’s not just a hawk either, but a ​Eurasian Goshawk​— “bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier.” A couple years ago ​I was birding with my birder pal Jody​ out in Edmonton and he was telling me about getting attacked by a ​Northern Goshawk​. Just swooping hard and fast at him down a forest clearing to the point he had to dive out of the way. “Really?,” I asked. “Oh yeah,” he said, bending over to focus his scope on 1000s of migrating ​American Avocets​ on a distant shore. “Goshawks are vicious, man. A friend of mine used to count their eggs for research. He looks like he’s lost a couple knife fights.” So what would compel a Cambridge professor to … raise one? To become a falconer? To master that ancient 4000 year-old art of taming your own bird of prey and training it to hunt? Well, after their father dies Helen falls into deep grief and revisits their childhood desire to become a falconer. They come up with the idea to train a goshawk as a way to, perhaps, be “feral”—to be free, to be ferocious. To come closer to life and examine it with intensity from many sides. On page 85: “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.” On page 110: “…in all my days of walking with Mabel [the hawk] the only people who have come up and spoken to us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks… ‘We are outsiders now, Mabel’, I say, and the thought is not unpleasant.” They let the hawk take over their life. On page 123: “I can’t go to Berlin in December, I’d thought, appalled. I have a hawk to fly. Ambitions, life-plans: these were for other people.” The book is a detailed literary journal that can be ominous and even spooky but is always somehow light enough to be death-examining without being a downer. Emotional lifts and tumbles left me in tears. And the entire book feels like a double-tunnel back in time a century ago as everything is paired with a ​Maria Popova​-esque examination of ​T.H. White​’s 1939-written (1951-published) ‘​The Goshawk​,’ which today may stand even higher than his other books like ‘​The Sword In The Stone​.’ Macdonald quotes White’s personal journals from the time which caution of a world heading to war all because “masters of men, everywhere, who subconsciously thrust others into suffering in order to advance their own powers.” History rings through this deep, exotic, mind-transplant to wet forests as you, yourself, become a falconer. And, maybe-hopefully, metabolize a bit of grief, doubt, or sadness you forgot you still had stuck inside.

8. ​Last Chance To See​ by Douglas Adams (1952–2001) and Mark Carwardine (b. 1959). I must have subconsciously been on a death-examining bender this month because here comes another one! (​I guess I tend to do that?​) Fact is: None of us know how long we have … as individuals nor as species as a whole. Douglas Adams left us in 2001 at 49 (​ugh​), long after bequeathing us his series of comic masterpieces including ‘​The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy​’ which came out in 1979. I’d read and loved that book as a teen and knew of his other fiction but I had no idea he spent a chunk of his late 30s criss-crossing the world with a zoologist pal looking for the world’s most endangered species. ​Komodo dragons​ of Indonesia! ​Kakapos​ of New Zealand! ​Blind river dolphins​ of China! ​White rhinos​ of Zaire! Originally broadcast as a radio show on the BBC, the written result is a zippy 218-page travel diary that is by turns fun … aggravating … and poignant. Perhaps like travel in general. In the first chapter while looking for Komodos he writes:

It is then quite an education to learn that two cats fighting can make easily as much noise as forty dogs. It is a pity to have to learn this at two-fifteen in the morning, but then the cats have a lot to complain about in Labuan Bajo. They all have their tails docked at birth, which is supposed to bring good luck, though presumably not to the cats.

In the second chapter in Zaire he writes “I wasn’t disturbed so much by the ‘Oh Lord, we thank Thee for the blessing of this Thy day,’ but ‘We commend our lives into Thy Hands, O Lord’ is frankly not the sort of thing you want to hear from a pilot as his hand is reaching for the throttle.” The book is mostly journey, not destination, but Adams’ sharp and curious mind always takes us down endless rabbit holes. He tells the story of the southern white rhino’s presumed extinction in the mid-1800s and then how a group of 9 (!) of them were found fifty years later and then taken care of so their population grew to 5000. When Douglas and his group are 40 yards away from the rhino he remarks on how its “nasal passages are bigger than its brain” and then tells us that:

The world of smells is now virtually closed to modern man. Not that we haven’t got a sense of smell—we sniff our food or wine, we occasionally smell a flower, and can usually tell if there’s a gas leak—but generally it’s all a bit of a blur, and often an irrelevant or bothersome blur at that. When we read that Napoleon wrote to Josephine on one occasion, ‘Don’t wash—I’m coming home,’ we are simply bemused, and almost think of it as a deviant behaviour. We are so used to thinking of sight, closely followed by hearing, as the chief of the senses that we find it hard to visualise (the word itself is a giveaway) a world that declares itself primarily to the sense of smell.

Something you don’t think about often! But true. And hopefully one thing AI won’t replicate for a while, right? Let’s enjoy those sacred smells of your mom’s cooking or your partner’s neck or your kid's hair and sweaty cheeks when you kiss them goodnight before bed. Through Adams’ early death and the disappearing animals he’s cataloguing the book serves as a mirrory reminder of the fragility and fleetingness … of everything.

9. There is no 9! Just our regular lootbag of links. Friend of 3 Books ​Sahil Bloom​ has ​his first book out​. I just got a copy and am excited to dig in. ​This episode of Brené Brown's podcast​ on burnout with Emily and Amelia Nagoski was transfixing and had so many great tips for the overworked among us. ​Does where you live impact your happiness​? Adam Grant tells us ​why we should read more fiction​. I try to avoid Meta and use the privacy-focused, donation-based, non-profit WhatsApp-alternative ​Signal​ for most of my texts and group chats. (I have no connection—just a fan and donor.) My friend ​Michael Bungay Stanier​ has ​a brand-new podcast​ focused on organizational change. I loved these ​incredible travel tips​ from ​Kevin Kelly​. ​Only Canadians will understand what's happening here​. A little ​more motivation​ to pick up the gym routine. And big thanks to Book Clubber Devra T. for sending me this article on ​how to read 100(!) pages a day​.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - January 2025

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

For most of my adult life I read 4 or 5 books a year. Not much! I read a lot as a kid but found my adult self reading newspapers, scrolling blogs, skimming Twitter.

Then I started dating someone new. She came back to my apartment and said “Where are all your books?” I had a shelf ... with not many books on it. Well, that woman is now my wife and she helped remind me how much I loved reading and how much better I feel—now as a husband, a dad, a friend, a writer—when I've intentionally spent time reading books versus letting my brain dissolve into the endless online information abyss. Today I read around 75 books a year and have a ​series of reading systems​ to keep this up.

This book club email is one of those systems! It's just a summary and review of every book I've read over the past month. I know I have to send it to you! So that keeps me reading. And I always love when you reply and share your reading list back with me.

For now: We still control our attention! So let's aim to keep turning off screens and picking up books. Let's delete social media and news media apps off our phone. Let's renew our library cards. And let's vision at the end of our lives having a giant bookshelf full of books we've read and grown from instead of a stack of old yellowed newspapers in the basement and some blurry long-forgotten scroll of soundbites and tweets.

It's harder than ever to read books these days! You help me keep the habit up and I hope I help you too. As I enter my ​10th year of writing this book club​ I want to say thank you for being here.

Please invite others to join us ​here​.

Now let's hit the books!

Neil

1. ​Balanced and Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children​ by Angela J. Hanscom. Parenting is hot! Suddenly everyone has a take. Tim Ferriss released back-to-back superlong chats with viral influencers ​Dr. Becky Kennedy​ (‘​Good Inside​’ ​9/2022​) and ​Aaron Stupple​ (‘​The Sovereign Child​’). But I have a reminder from our grandmas: There are infinite ways to parent. Hands-on, hands-off, lots of rules, hardly any, structured and inside or, in the case of this book, unstructured and outside. You do you! No one way is perfect. I think of our job as learning as much as we can—doing the best we can. Brilliant and effervescent Ginny Yurich (of ​1000 Hours Outside​) recommended this to me and I took so much from it. Angela Hanscom is a pediatric occupational therapist who tells us that our kids are getting fragile, frail, and fidgety because they’re sitting and staring at screens while starving their bodies of unstructured outdoor play. On page 13 she shares a study comparing kid strength from 1998 to 2008—only 10 years!—and shows the # of sit ups 10-year-olds could do bombed 27.1%, arm strength plummeted 26%, and grip strength sank 7%. Why? Not enough time climbing trees, jumping off rocks, making up their own games with their own rules. She talks about how free play develops our eyesight, our skeletal systems, and loads more. One fun example: Spinning! Do you ever see kids just ... spinning in circles ... looking completely nuts? Sure, all the time. And what do adults say? “Stop! Sit down! You could get hurt!” But “spinning stimulates the vestibular sense which helps them become more coordinated, sure-footed, and less likely to trip or run into things.” Research shows spinning “activates hair cells on the inner ear which sends motor messages through the spinal cord which helps maintain muscle tone and body posture.” Yes, your ​vestibular sense​ lays the foundation for other senses and “spinning leads to alertness, attention, and a sense of calm in the classroom.” Way back in the Internet paleolithic I wrote an essay on ​1000 Awesome Things​ celebrating “​Old, dangerous playground equipment​.” Now it looks prophetic with books like this and ‘The Anxious Generation’ (​4/2024​) calling for a return to too-tall teeter-totters, monkey bars in the sky, and big spinners where everyone falls dizzily down the hill afterwards. The book is a little stiffly written—a little study after study after study—and, sure, I wish it had pictures or more of a freewheeling tone (like ‘Free Range Kids’ ​5/2023​) but it’s still really wonderful, and a much-needed reminder that many of our ails can be cured by ditching endless programs and just getting outside. How much? Well, Ginny says 1000 hours a year and she's made a bunch of ​handy trackers​ for those who want to systemize it. (You know I love the ​power of 1000​.) Highly recommended.

2. ​Small Things Like These ​by Claire Keegan. Did you know that in Ireland from 1765 to 1996 a series of state- and Catholic-run ‘​Magdalene Laundries​’ housed and locked up ‘fallen women,’ the definition of which originally meant sex workers but grew to include orphans, victims of rape or incest, any woman abandoned by her family, and any woman who didn’t conform to the rules of society? I ... did not. This 2022 Booker shortlisted book follows Keegan's 2010 stunner ‘Foster’ (​9/2023​) and takes a slow pan shot of a couple wintry months in New Ross, Ireland in 1985. We see the world through the eyes of a local upstanding businessman, Bill Furlong, as he wrestles with what he discovers up on the hill. Here’s the book's opening paragraph: “In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain.” You’re right there. Keegan is “as good as Chekhov,” ​David Mitchell​ says, and I agree. The book is like a poem in a play. And at 13 point font, 1.5 spacing, and 119 pages, you can actually read the whole thing quickly and feel good about yourself. Great one to kick off the year! Highly recommended.

3. ​Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder​ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Back in like 2010 I was sitting on my swively chair in my Walmart HR department cubicle late on a Friday afternoon. Everyone was racing off for the weekend but I was still fairly recently divorced and in no rush to head downtown to an empty apartment with no plans. I wandered the halls and stepped into a dark training room. Motion-sensor neon flickered on illuminating a whiteboard, couple easels, and an old laminate bookshelf with a couple dozen books. ‘​The Tipping Point​,’ ‘​Good To Great​,’ ‘​How To Win Friends And Influence People​.’ And a book I’d never heard of but was immediately drawn to ... I decided to grab it for the weekend:

I say with all sincerity that book changed my life. It helped me realize how random everything is—much more random than we think!—and how ‘black swan events’ (disproportionately huge things with big impact) are really unpredictable. So to ‘win’ at whatever you want to win in, you have to make small bets. You have no idea what'll work! Nobody does. For me that meant ​saying yes​. Trying things! Expanding my ‘what I do’ mentality to include things like writing a ​kids book​, giving ​keynote speeches​, starting ​a podcast​ and, yes, ​writing email newsletters​. Just keep trying and then you’ll eventually see what takes off—internally and externally. Well, ‘Antifragile’ is the 2012 sequel to the 2007 ‘The Black Swan’ (​11/2016​) and it's the final book by hedge-fund-manager-turned-philospher-king Nassim Nicholas Taleb. You can flip past seemingly endless pages of Contents and Notes to the opening paragraph which comes on page 31: “You are in the post office about to send a gift, a package full of champagne glasses, to a cousin in central Siberia.” What do you label the box? Fragile, right? But now: what’s the opposite? No, it’s not “resilient” or “robust,” because that would be for items that “neither break nor improve.” As Taleb says: “Logically, the exact opposite of a ‘fragile’ parcel would be a package on which one has written ‘please mishandle’ or ‘please handle carelessly’ ... we give the appellation ‘antifragile’ to such a package; a neologism was necessary as there is no simple, noncompound word in the Oxford English Dictionary that expresses the point of reverse fragility.” The concept is both new and old. I mean: what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right? But to enjoy, embrace, and enhance our lives with small pains—so we may improve—isn't always obvious. Taleb says fragile is the “New York Banking system” and antifragile is “Silicon Valley’s ‘Fail Fast’ and ‘Be Foolish’” adages. He says fragile is “Classroom” and antifragile is “Real life and library,” fragile is “post-traumatic stress” and antifragile is “post-traumatic growth,” fragile is “e-readers” and antifragile is “oral tradition,” fragile in finance is “short option” and antifragile is “long option.” This is the final of his four-book ‘Incerto’ set that also includes ‘Fooled By Randomness’ (2003) and a smaller book of aphorisms, with the entire series seeking to investigate “opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don’t understand the world, expressed in the form of a personal essay with autobiographical sections, stories, parables, and philosophical, historical, and scientific discussions in nonoverlapping volumes that can be accessed in any order.” He's a bit of a mouthful, right? But he’s so brilliant, and he presents the information like a tart old professor who likes to pause and wink a lot. From why you should eat vegan once a week (“Deprivation is a stressor”) to fascinating The Lindy Effect, this book is so wide-minded and feels like some kind of 14-layer dip for your brain. A good one to dip in and out of and keep applying back to your life. Highly recommended.

4. ​Day of the Triffids​ by John Wyndham. This is ​one of Nick Sweetman’s 3 most formative books​. And I love Nick Sweetman! He’s a magical graffiti artist who decorates the streets of Toronto with spray paint images of (mostly) wild animals doing wild animal things against the backdrop of our increasing concrete jungle:

I mean, look at the eye on that ​Hooded Merganser​. Look at that beak! How does he do it? It was an honor partnering 3 Books with Nick to create a 750-square foot mural of 16 local bird species at Toronto's ​Dupont subway station​. ​Here’s Nick’s Instagram post​ announcing the wall and the ​3 Books documentary​ we just dropped on the full moon that just passed. (Btw I finally figured out how to disable those annoying YouTube ads from ​my YouTube channel​ so you can ​watch the whole thing ad-free​. Since 2008 all my blog posts, newsletters, podcasts, and now YouTube videos are ad, sponsor, and commercial-free. If you want to support my stuff ​buy a book​!) Anyway, uh, where were we? ‘Day of the Triffids’! Yes, read ‘Day of the Triffids’! A 1951 post-apocalyptic slow-paced horror show that served as inspiration for films like ‘​28 Days Later​.’ The book opens with everyone on earth observing an incredible “celestial spectacle” as the earth flies through some comet debris. Well, almost everyone! Our narrator was getting surgery at the hospital that day and his “eyes, indeed my whole head, should be wreathed in bandages.” But then what? Everyone goes blind the next day! Whoops! And then these giant Venus-fly-trap-like plants start taking over the earth. If you liked ‘The Chrysalids’ (​2/2018​), this is slower, darker, deeper, meatier. And, if you’re like Nick Sweetman, who also recommended ‘The World Without Us’ by Alan Weisman (​7/2024​), you maybe … on some level … find the book inspiring. As Nick says, “200 years without humans every city on earth would be gone without a trace. That is exciting to me.”

5. ​The Monster At The End Of This Book​ written by Jon Stone, illustrated by Mike Smollin. A few years ago I asked on Twitter, “​What's one book you loved as a kid that's still sits on your bookshelf today?​” This comes to mind first for me! (‘​Sideways Stories From Wayside School​’ by ​Louis Sacher​ is a close second.) My tattered hardcover still has my sister’s clunky 10-year-old name handwritten inside and we’ve had to put packing tape on the inside spine to hold it together:

I still read this book to my kids all the time. It has incredible never-ending appeal as Grover keeps begging you, the reader, to stop flipping pages, because he’s terrified of the monster at the end of this book.

Is this the OG interactive picture book? It came out in 1971! (I can squint see I have the Little Golden Book’s 22nd printing from 1982.) Maybe you could argue there was ‘​Pat The Bunny​’ (1940) with its stuffed cotton or ‘​The Very Hungry Caterpillar​’ (1960) with its baby-finger-sized holes, but nothing really broke the fourth wall like this book and it came decades before ‘​Press Here​’ by Hervé Tullet or ‘​Tap The Magic Tree’​ by Christie Matheson. (I borrowed the concept myself with ‘​Awesome Is Everywhere​,’ my 2015 picture book where you ‘tap the earth’ to zoom all the way underwater and deep into the sand). I recommend not buying the (smaller) board book version of this and getting a big picture book instead where you can really fall into it. (There are good used copies on ​Abe​ or ​ThriftBooks​). There’s just such commitment to form here. The delightfully popping images, the escalating tension, the violent smashing of brick walls and ropes—it's an action movie for five-year-olds. Highly recommended.

6. ​Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling​ by John Taylor Gatto. A 1992 collection of essays and speech transcripts by 30-year public school teacher John Taylor Gatto who won the New York State Teacher of the Year award. Gatto is a fiery activist and I love him! It’s so refreshing hearing someone on the inside of the school system pick it all apart and put it back together again. Let’s start with the fact that he decries bells! Get rid of bells! “Indeed the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do.” He talks about how the system squashes intrinsic motivation and fills brainspace with extrinsic motivators, too. (I write about this in the “Do It For You” chapter of ‘​The Happiness Equation​.’) How does he put it? “By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestinated chain of command.” Fast forward from 1992 to today and now we've got views and likes and comments and shares. We have digitally altered our brains into valuing what we can see and measure over everything we can’t and don’t—like nature, time outside, eye contact, touch, and ​holding hands​. Things like ​awesome things​. Things that, indeed, help us become antifragile. As Zachary Slayback writes in the foreword: “The best teacher I had was one who signed passes so students could skip other classes to go to her classroom and work on whatever they wanted. The worst were those obsessed with meeting state-mandated standards.” What’s the takeaway, parents? Take your foot off the gas. Don’t worry about organized sports every night. Let your kids wander. Let them dream. Let them get bored. Let them hang around outside. Let them see and observe what's compulsory and then make space for them to do anything but.

7. ​The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus: A Roman Slave​ by Publius Syrus. Over 2000 years ago a Roman slave named Publius Syrus went from captured and shipped to successful playwright. Why don’t we know his plays? They were burned! Destroyed! Lost! Gone, forever, to the eternities. What remains are 1087 pithy aphorisms that survived millennia, many likely culled from the plays, and which today fill a 44-page pamphlet-sized book. (Yes, I am officially adding this to our “​Great Books Under 150 Pages​” and our “​Enlightened Bathroom Reader​” series.) Syrus’s messages don’t fit neatly into any category which is partly why they’re fun to read. Stoic, Epicurean, Skeptic, Cynic? No. They’re just little bonks to the brain. From #1 “As men we are all equal in the presence of death” to #2 “The evil you do to others you may expect in return” to #4 “To dispute a drunkard is to debate an empty house” to #18 “Do not find your happiness in another’s sorrow” to #19 “An angry lover tells himself many lies” to #155 “A god can hardly disturb a man truly happy” to #216 “There is no need of spurs when the horse is running away” all the way up to #1087 “Man’s life is short; and therefore an honorable death is his immortality.” I learned about this book via ​Lindyman​ who wrote about this and other books of aphorisms in his August 2024 Lindy Newsletter “​Don’t Give Up On Reading Just Yet​.” Publius stands the test of time. Very Lindy! Chances are we may still be reading him in another 2000 years. Highly recommended.

8. ​A Pattern Language: Towns – Buildings – Construction​ by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. Weird title, great book! Maybe this hefty 1189-page butter yellow 1977 Oxford University Press book should have been called “The Architect and Urban Planner’s Bible” or just “How To Build A City, From Scratch, With Instructions On Everything From Neighborhood Density To Window Sizes To Street Width To Park Size To Grave Site Location To Number of Bus Stops Annnnd How These And Everything Else Affect How We Live.” I skipped most of the construction bits but ate up the social and cultural stuff. Like on page 115 where the authors, who spent over a decade with a 6-person team putting this thing together, write about “Tall Buildings” in a section called “Finding Solace In The City”: “There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy … High buildings have no genuine advantage, except in speculative gains for banks and land owners. They are not cheaper, they do not help create open space, they destroy the townscape, they destroy social life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open spaces near them, and they damage light and air and view. But quite apart from all this, empirical evidence shows that they can actually damage people’s minds and feelings.” They go on to suggest a four-story limit and show cities where this works—and why. And this isn’t some lightweight saying it! Christopher Alexander received the first-ever PhD in Architecture from Harvard and went on to teach Architecture for decades at University of California, Berkeley. He and his team never stop crashing cymbals either. On page 216 he writes about the city principle of “Old People Everywhere”: “… when elderly communities are too isolated or too large, they damage young and old alike. The young in other parts of town, have no chance of the benefit of older company, and the old people themselves are far too isolated … contemporary society shunts away old people; and the more shunted away they are, the deeper the rift between the old and the young … And the segregation of the old causes the same rift inside each individual life; as old people pass into old age communities their ties with their own past become unacknowledged, lost, and therefore broken. Their youth is no longer alive in their old age—the two become dissociated; their lives are cut in two.” I thought about this book a lot—even around seeming-innocuous things like whether to invite my mom over for dinner on a busy night. The answer? Do it! This book cites a 1945 Yale University Press book on ‘The Role of the Aged in Primitive Society’ which says “Some degree of prestige for the aged seems to have been practically universal in all known societies. … Frequently the very young and the very old have been left together at home while the able-bodied have gone forth to earn the family living. These oldsters, in their wisdom and experience, have protected and instructed the little ones, while the children, in turn, have acted as the ‘eyes, ears, hands, and feet’ of their feeble old friends.” This is a massive book I have spent hours with and still feel like I have only scratched the surface. Seismic! Definitive! Even the creator of ​SimCity​ says this was one of his inspirations ... and five decades later it’s still in print. An epic tome building and building well. Highly recommended.

9. There is no 9! Just our regular lootbag of links. First up, I have not been able to get a copy of Mel Robbins's new book ‘​The Let Them Theory​.’ Literally every bookstore in Canada is sold out. It sold 800,000 copies in the first three weeks (!) so I'm hoping to finally find one and review it for you soon. Here are some ​things I've learned from Mel​ and here she is ​on 3 Books​. I also talked in the intro about the challenge of reading these days and wanted to mention that if you need help try taking my friend ​@alexandbooks_​ new course called ‘​The Art of Reading​.’ I love Alex's ​reading newsletter​, too. Readers, unite! I already love walking and ​Dan Go has given me another reason​ to keep it up. A Peter Attia podcast on ​meaningful experiences > full savings account​. ​Nora McInerny​ has a ​new call-in podcast​. Who are you ​cheering for​ in the NFL conference championships? “​You can read Siddartha 100 times and still be blown away on the 101st​.” A reasonable ​Canadian currency discussion​. ​Adam Grant tells us​ our "attention spans increase with practice." And ​a graph​ I can't stop thinking about. Lastly, if you want me in your inbox every single day you can also get my ​daily awesome thing​—18 years running now! Thanks for reading all the way to to very end...

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - November 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

I started writing this book club 8 years ago.

So it’s been ​96 straight issues​ till this one. Just getting started! I’d love to do 1000. I was born September 1979 so that means I’ll hit the final issue March 2091 at a spritely 111.

We’ll still be emailing, too, me and you. We won’t let it go. Everyone will be telling us to just blink it to each other’s storage, but those are the same people who told us we should “really get on TikTok.”

Anyway, I’m joking. But thanks. For the sanity, for the conversations, for the safe space, for the never-ending chatter about books. I love your endless suggestions and replies and love this secret hiding place we can duck away from everything for a while.

Neil

PS. Invite others to join us ​here​.

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1. ​We The Animals​ by Justin Torres. For the last few years a haunting spectre loomed at the front of bookstores. I am of course speaking of the “Trending On #BookTok” table with its seeming never-ending foisting of Colleen Hoover and James Clear. No offense to Colleen and James—love those guys—but after 5 years it just felt … boring. That’s why I was excited to walk into the holiday-bedazzled ​downtown Toronto flagship Indigo​ and see they’d collapsed the #BookTok table for some new ones:

The Signed Editions table! The Ann Patchett Picks table! The Yuval Noah Harari table! I walked up to the New York Times ‘​100 Best Books of the 20th Century​’ table and felt immediately smug for having read a few on display like ‘Cloud Atlas’ (​6/2019​) by ​David Mitchell​, ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ (​10/2023​) by Gabrielle Zevin, and ‘Lincoln In The Bardo’ (​4/2018​) by ​George Saunders​. Then I did that un-smug thing of looking for something new. A silhouette of three young boys Peter Panning across the sky caught my eye and I picked up this flimsy quarter-inch 2011 debut novel by Justin Torres (b. 1980) and flipped to the first paragraph where it fishhooked my eyes:

We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.

Light, fire, energy, intrigue. The first of the nineteen short, unnumbered chapters sets a near-impossible high bar for pace and a certain sepia-tinged-electricity but the rest of the book keeps punching up and smacking it. ​Steve-Malkmussy-titled​ chapters like “We Wanted More,” “Wasn’t No One To Stop This,” and “Big-Dick Truck” confuse then reveal in little tales all carefully strung together. Take the 4-page “Big-Dick Truck” which shares the story of the family car breaking down and Paps finally heading to the city while the boys wait outside “snapping the yellow dandelion heads off their stems and streaking them down our arms, painting ourselves in gold, waiting for him to return.” Paps shows up in a brand new truck and thrills the neighborhood kids with its “bench seat,” “skinny, two-foot-long gearshift that came up from the floor,” and “massive side mirror jutted outward like elephant ears.” But then there is trouble:

Ma came out and stood on the stoop, looking tired and pissed. Her eyes were red and her mouth was set, puckering in on itself. She held her boots in one hand, then let them drop in front of her and sat down on the first step.

“Well, mami?” Paps asked.

“How many seats does it have?” she said, picking up a boot and jerking at the laces.

“It’s a truck,” Paps mumbled. “It don’t got seats, it got a bench.”

Ma smiled at the boot, a mean smile; she didn’t look up or look at anything besides that boot. “How many seat belts?”

The neighborhood kids started to climb down and sneak away, all the excitement receding with them like a tide.

“Why you gotta be like that?”

“Me?” Ma said, then she repeated the question, “Me? Me? Me?” Each me was louder and more frantic than the last. “How many fucking kids do you have? How many fucking kids, and a wife, and how much money do you make? How much do you earn, sitting on your ass all day, to pay for this truck? This fucking truck that doesn’t even have enough seat belts to protect your family.” She spat in the direction of the driveway. “This fucking big-dick truck.”

Damn. Again and again he pulls this off. And you gasp and laugh and shiver and wince and feel pressure in your chest and wetness in your eyes. You are right there with the boys in fistfights, empty fields, cold basements, and inside sleeping bags on dim polished office floors. Exquisite, haunting, enchanting, lyrical, tough, raw, pure. Highly recommended.

2. ​Bowling Alone​ by Robert Putnam. This is one of those books I have been hearing people talk about for years and which was sitting on some dusty shelf in my brain with a label like “The OG Book on Loneliness” or “That Dissolution-of-Community Book.” But I didn't really know much about it until now. And I have to say: it’s kind of what I thought but something much more statistical and inconclusive, too. The book reads like a lovable supernerd decided to spend a year of their life in the mid-90s chasing down a phone book’s worth of endless stats about anything that could, might, or might not affect what we think of as community, connection, and culture. And then he read it all and made graphs and maps and takeaways and added his own sort of uniquely proffered insights in a hand-stitched-together way. The conclusion comes early on page 27:

For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago—silently, without warning—that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.

Statistics are fast and furious from there. I felt buried in statistics! Like “By 1965 disrespect for public life, so endemic in our history, seemed to be waning. Gallup pollsters discovered that the number of Americans who would like to see their children ‘go into politics as a life’s work’ had nearly doubled over little more than a decade” and “The proportion that agreed that ‘most people can be trusted,’ for example, rose from an already high 66 percent during and after World War II to a peak of 77 percent in 1964.” and “In the mid- to late 70s...the average American entertained friends at home about fourteen to fifteen times a year. By the late 1990s that figure had fallen to eight times per year, a decline of 45 percent…”. But the book was written in 2000 so I kept thinking “What about now! What about now!” And while most of the data is from the past few decades (70s, 80s, 90s, really) Putnam does manage to zoom up into a century long view where the whole thing is less of a decline and more of a U-curve. As in: We didn’t used to live like this, then we did, now we don’t again. So community and loneliness... cycles? And it’ll come back? Or it's gone forever? The far-past and far-future are dark and blurry! I did love the stats, though. I felt like a trivia hound with a stack of dog-eared Trivial Pursuit cards on a futon at the end of a party. Like on page 137: “… people who trust others are all-round good citizens, and those more engaged in community life are both more trusting and more trustworthy.” And “….people who trust their fellow citizens volunteer more often, contribute more to charity, participate more often in politics and community organizations, serve more readily on juries, give blood more frequently, comply more fully with their tax obligations, are more tolerant of minority views, and display many other forms of civic virtue.” The book is useful and important! Annnnnnnd also a bit outdated and unhelpful. To his credit this 20th anniversary edition includes a 2020 'Afterword' on page 415 where he asks “Has the Internet reversed the decline of social capital?” He gives a history of phones and social media, tells us he rejects techno-determinism (the idea that technology controls us, which, because of ​Kevin Kelly's​ ​'What Technology Wants'​, I somewhat buy), buries us in another pile of statistics, and then offers… not much. He does cite a research study showing having more IRL friends skyrockets your happiness while having more online friends … does not. But this is 2020 and the research is 2013 and the world feels unrecognizable between then and now. The moral and ethical questions facing us now hit much deeper. AI, bots, apps, online everything. The book is a fascinating and valuable piece of detailed human history on the rise of loneliness in the second half of the 20th century but I wish we had someone to tell us what's going on right now.

3. ​The Long Walk​ by Stephen King. I was in the Dallas airport. It was just after lunch on a Friday. I was speed-walking from security to Gate E3 where my flight was boarding. I had flown there last night, given a speech that morning, and had dress-shirted to sweat-shirted on the highway to catch my flight home. I felt like zombieing out to Netflix on the flight. No shame in that. But then I pictured myself Ubering from the airport to dinner with my family all glassy-eyed and headachy. I felt like … reading. Something! Anything! I race into the Hudson thinking I have 30 seconds to grab a book or I’m hanging with ​Demetri​. I see about 30 books on two low shelves and they are arranged in … bestseller list order? Fiction #1, Fiction #2, across the top, Non-Fiction #1, Non-Fiction #2 across the bottom. Ulgh. Meaty Pulitzer prize winners, Presidential memoirs, YA fantasies. No book guilt and no book shame in any of those but they were 700-page bricks. Like getting a Fred Flintstone rib-eye when you wanted a Slim Jim.

I have like a 2-hour flight home so I’m suddenly thinking maybe it’s better to just watch family videos on my camera roll or have a scotch and soda and a nap. All viable! But then I see it! At the end of the rack! Something smaller. STEPHEN KING on the cover. “45th anniversary edition!” screams a blurb. 45? That's an odd anniversary. I am 45! I pick up a book, check the copyright, and sure enough—1979. Just like me. Why are they reprinting this book I wonder? Is it a movie? No. Is it about something timely? I crack open page 1: “An old blue Ford pulled into the guarded parking lot that morning, looking like a small, tired dog after a hard run.” This is ‘The Road’ (​2/2017​) meets ‘The Hunger Games,’ except written before either of those. The gist: 100 sixteen-year-old boys apply to be selected to begin walking on a specific day of each year and any time anybody stops for longer than a couple pauses they are immediately shot and killed and dragged off the road. And the entire book is that walk with ​‘Stand By Me’ clubhouse-like teen conversation​ written when Stephen King was 30. The plot races and darkens but it’s always more terse than terrifying. “The crowd cheered monotonously. Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit.” The plot seems as morally bland as a canvas but King's writing pulls off a magic trick that allows you to endlessly, and perhaps accidentally, project your own morals onto it and then feel them bouncing back to you for interpretation. The book is told in a seductive first-person-y third-person where we follow Ray Garraty—pride of Maine, where the race starts!—the long, long way. There’s nothing grotesque in the book—nothing gruesome, nothing jumping out of the forest. It’s not scary but haunting, thrilling. Highly recommended.

4. ​ADHD IS Awesome: A Guide To (Mostly) Thriving With ADHD​ by Penn and Kim Holderness. This is a book about ADHD written by a person with ADHD (Penn) and designed for an ADHD brain. I loved it. It’s like a giant color expandable instruction manual full of tiny color drawings, bits of research, personal stories, boxed-in asides (from the loving and supporting partner to a person with ADHD, Kim). Distracting and messy and factual and philosophical and jumpy and funny and empathetic and illuminating and it … somehow … all just works. This is the new ADHD classic! Penn and Kim Holderness are perhaps most famous for ​winning The Amazing Race​ and creating viral videos like my favorite June 2020 “​Hamilton Mask-up Parody Medley​.” Did you like ‘​Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader​’ as a kid? This is like the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader of ADHD. Like a mashup parody, Penn doesn’t soar through 19 chapters with titles like “Charge Your Battery,” “Master Your Daily Routine,” and “Taking Care of Caretakers” pretending to be the who’s who and what’s what of ADHD. He doesn’t profess unique academic insights gleaned from years of study nor proffer clever acrostics featuring the “7 benefits of ADHD.” He’s just a curious wide-eyed, wide-minded ball of energy who’s taken a deep amount of time to understand his over-20-year-old diagnosis of ADHD. He has done this through interviews with leading researchers, sharing insights from his own readings and experiences at home, and clearly done a lot of self-examination. The result is an ADHD Almanac. A collection of all the stuff we know about ADHD that could help you and your loved ones. (Including, fun fact, that ADHD itself is horribly titled—that both Ds are wrong and it’s neither a deficit nor a disorder—so researchers including ​Edward Hallowell​, who wrote the 1994 ADHD book ‘Driven To Distraction’ as well as the foreword here, are trying to change it to VAST for ‘Variable Attention Stimulus Trait’). I have ADHD in my family (some official, some unofficial) and this book has been a wonderful read on many levels. In the Introduction there is a warm-hearted “Note from People Who Have ADHD to People Who Don’t Have ADHD” with points like “1. We love you—even if it may not always look that way to you. and 2. The easy things are sometimes the hardest things for us to do.” In chapter 1 Penn writes that “a typical person with ADHD will have challenges with listening, completing tasks, and keeping track of time (and possessions). They’ll be restless, always ‘on the go’, talkative, and impatient.” Sound like anyone you know? On page 42 in the chapter titled “Inside the ADHD Brain” Penn tells us that “At its core, the ADHD brain is wired to seek stimulation… While the typical understanding of ADHD suggests that people who have it are overstimulated, the ADHD brain is actually chronically understimulated.” He then quotes YouTuber Jessica McCabe (who runs the viral channel ​How To ADHD​) who says that ADHD brains are attracted to “1. Novelty, 2. Challenges, and 3. Things of personal interest.” The book bounces along and offers magazine-like asides and tangential columns. On page 61 Penn offers his “personal tweaks I’d suggest to make life more ADHD-friendly” and he includes suggestions like “restaurants don’t take reservations”, “schools have 20-minute class periods”, and “every product comes with a warranty that covers straight-up losing it”. On page 82 he shows that most ADHD benefits are not teachable (creativity, hyperfocus, intuition, determination) while its downsides are manageable (inattention, impulsivity, hyperactivity). He openly shares his own experience with ADHD medication, why it didn’t work for him, while completely supporting your own path and showing there are many. Perhaps the best advice of all comes in Chapter 19’s “Listening: The Best Hard Habit” where Penn accurately writes about the pains of interruption and teaches mental games and 'escape room phrases' that ADHD brains can play to observe and improve their listening skills. ‘ADHD is Awesome’ is awesome. Highly recommended.

5. ​The BFG​ by Roald Dahl. I’m on a read-aloud roll with my just-turned-6 year old. He loved ‘Little House in the Big Woods’ (​4/2024​), mildly enjoyed ‘Little House on the Prairie’ (​8/2024​), and then loved ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ (​8/2024​). So what next? Leslie is currently reading ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ with him (her first time!) and I felt like it might be good to do another Roald Dahl. But which one? ‘James and the Giant Peach’? ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox?’ I think ‘Matilda’ (​3/2020​) and ‘The Twits’ (​7/2020​) seem too old. Then it hit me! ‘The BFG’! I don’t think I’ve read it since I was a kid and I’d forgotten how spooky the opening scene was with tiny Sophie waking up in the middle of the night and walking to the cold second-story window of her orphanage before spotting a TWENTY-FOOT TALL GIANT down the street, a giant which proceeds, in painful, terrifying chapter after chapter, to peek through her window and snatch her up. (“If you can think of anything more terrifying than that happening to you in the middle of the night, then lets hear about it,” Dahl jovially intones on page 17.) After being kidnapped Sophie discovers nine other giants who all run all over the earth to snatch and gobble down kids for dinner every night. And if they saw her she’d be eaten immediately! Her bones violently crunched! But, luckily, she partners with the Big, Friendly Giant to concoct a secret dream mixture which they then run over to Buckingham Palace and pour in into the Queen’s ear while she’s sleeping and then the Queen wakes up and orders all the scary giants captured and dropped into a big hole! Funny, suspenseful, full of fear and cheer. I’m adding it to my new ​Best Read-Aloud Books List​. Now: What do you suggest we read next? Just reply and let me know.

6. ​Revenge of the Librarians: Cartoons​ by Tom Gauld. If you love books you’ll love this book. A couple hundred pages of book-themed, writer-themed, reader-themed big rectangle-page-long cartoons that are like some literary blender brew of ‘​Herman​’ and ‘​Bizarro​.’ On page 21 he splits his single panel into five thin vertical frames titled “Waiting For Godot To Join The Zoom Meeting” which closes with them agreeing to go before the final caption “They Do Not Leave The Meeting.” He offers “Novels Edited and Republished For The Time-Pressed Modern Reader” featuring “One Hundred Minutes of Solitude” and “20 Leagues Under The Sea.” A single panel frame offers a silhouetted person in a bookstore asking a silhouetted pony-tailed bookseller “Can you recommend a big, serious novel that I can carry around and ignore while I’m looking at my smartphone?” And, of course, there’s his “Advice On Caring For Your Books That Also Works For Parenting” including “Take special care not to damage the spine,” “Do not let too many pile on top of one another,” and “Only lend them to reliable friends.” Published in 2022 it includes many pandemic related strips that made me shudder in memory but overall a wonderful slew of book-themed cartoons that I loved.

7. ​Stitches: A Memoir​ by David Small. I don’t think I have ever come across a graphic novel before with one of those little metallic stickers saying “National Book Award Finalist.” I tore through this fifteen-year-old 329-page masterpiece in a breathless 45 minutes. And then before the end of the month I’d picked it up and done it all over again. “I was six” and “Detroit” are the only four words found on the 17 panels spread over the first six pages. The frames zoom in and out, fast and emotionally jarring. It’s an autobiography told in a few trauma-laced stories. There are his mom’s “furious, silent withdrawals” and his dressing up as Alice from ‘Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland’ (​4/2019​) to sing on the school playgrounds before bullies find him as well as visits to his horrifying grandmother’s house (“You durn little fool!”). Endless emotional clashes that leave you lurching from shame to fear to joy to, well, back to shame again. But the thrilling ride is worth it. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… the man who never reads lives only one” reads a quote from Jogen in ‘A Dance with Dragons’ by George R. R. Martin. Reading this book, and reading it again, certainly feels like living another one. Thank you David Small for this exquisite and soulful deep share. Highly recommended.

8. ​The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance​ by W. Timothy Gallwey, with a foreword by Pete Carroll, then-head football coach at USC. I have heard this 1974 classic referred to as the original book on sports psychology. But it’s really just about psychology. Your inner voice. Your inner critic. Taming that inner demon. I first spotted it on the remainder table at ​BMV Books​ and then read it on a flight to Memphis back in 2017. It’s a great pick-it-up-again book. On page 1 Gallwey sets down his thesis—that everybody talks about playing sports without talking about the *inner* game—the one that “takes place in the mind of the player, and it is played against such obstacles as lapses in concentration, nervousness, self-doubt, and self-condemnation.” He shares that the “secret to winning any game is not trying too hard” and that “too much instruction is worse than none.” How do you do that? By practicing non-judgmental awareness—separating what happened from what you think about what happened. He goes on about this for a while but the examples and stories really bring it to life. Near the end, on page 120, he reminds us that: “Winning is overcoming obstacles to reach a goal, but the value of winning is only as great as the value of the goal reached. Reaching the goal itself may not be as valuable as the experience that can come in making a supreme effort to overcome the obstacles involved. The process can be more rewarding than the victory.” Indeed! I said 5000 words ago that I wanted to do 1000 of these monthly book clubs up to age 111. If I make it? Great! If I don't? Well, the process is more important than the victory. The book taps back into the way most people used to play sports and also serves as a gentle reminder that the person who has the most fun wins. Highly recommended.

9. There is no 9! Just our regular loot bag of links. Australia just ​banned social media for people under 16​. Librarians are ​burning out​. Colorectal cancer is ​on the rise​ so ask your doc about doing an at-home (non-invasive) ​FIT test to help with early detection​. Ugh, and potentially related, more terrible things about ​forever chemicals​. Over the pandemic cycling skyrocketed in Toronto and the city was covered in a fresh lattice of bike lanes. Now the province is trying to quash the City of Toronto's wishes & scrap them! I donate to ​CycleTO​ and ​shared bike lane thoughts on the ever-toxic Twitter​. (Btw: Is BlueSky any better? I just opened ​a BlueSky account​ to find out...). ​George Saunders​ tipped me off to this cool “​personalized book reading list with donation​” offer from literary mag ​n+1​. ​Jonathan Haidt​ was on CBS talking about ​how technology is changing society​. Speaking of, I thought ​Rich Roll did a great job interviewing Yuval Noah Harari​. I enjoyed ​this NYT profile on “Lindyman” Paul Skallas​ and he writes the eye-opening ​The Lindy Newsletter​, too. I was ​Michael Bungay Stanier's​ ​last-ever podcast guest on 2 Pages​—talking about ‘A Fraction of a Whole’ (​2/2023​) by ​Steve Toltz​. And, finally, the publisher has just done a fresh reprint of my shiny golden book ‘​The Book of (Holiday) Awesome​’—click the pic below to grab a copy.

photo by @​thebookbagblog

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Interested in more of my reviews? Read my monthly book clubs or visit my Goodreads page.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - October 2024

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Hey everyone,

“Books are in a very good place!”

That was the first thing James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and ​Daunt Books​ said to me when ​we recently sat down​ (​Apple​/​Spotify​). He should know! James has been bookselling for 35 years and today is the largest bookseller in the world overseeing nearly 1000 bookstores. “Bookstores are inherently democratic,” he says and he told me authors like ​Sarah J. Maas​ and ​Rebecca Yaros​ are driving a passion for reading he "hasn’t seen since Harry Potter.”

You know how soothing it feels when that ​dull, incessant noise in the background suddenly stops​? I feel like that’s the offer with books these days. Quiet the noise! Step away from the screaming screens. And step into peace, tranquility, and imagination.

Neil

P.S. Know someone who wants to read more? They can join us ​here​!

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1. ​Breath: The New Science Of A Lost Art​ by James Nestor. This book is changing my sleep, my energy, my mood. I get up to go pee in the middle of the night. Sometimes twice. Sometimes three times. Have for years. Premature old man, I guess. But then I read this book. And now I’ve seemingly stopped. I learned in Chapter 3 that overnight mouth breathers—nearly half of us!—lose 40% more water than nose breathers. You know you’re one of us if you sometimes wake up with your mouth like sandpaper in the Sahara. I’d incorrectly assumed overnight dry-mouth wake-ups might contribute to less overnight peeing—like you’d want to keep the water in—but turns out the opposite is true. Nestor writes: “During the deepest, most restful stages of sleep, the pituitary gland, a pea-size ball at the base of the brain, secretes hormones that control the release of adrenaline, endorphins, growth hormone, and other substances, including vasopressin, which communicates with cells to store more water. This is how animals can sleep through the night without feeling thirsty or needing to relieve themselves.” Vass-oh-press-in? I kept reading and discovered that “90% of children have acquired some degree of deformity in their mouths and noses,” 45% of adults snore (not good!), and a whopping 25% of us even CHOKE OURSELVES AWAKE because of sleep apnea—which has a ridiculous undiagnosed case rate of 80%. What helps? Nose breathing. Keeps you hydrated. Prevents snoring. Gets that vasopressin flowing. And (maybe!) keeps you from getting up to go pee. We have so many breathing issues today. Partly it's the old “big evolving brain in a jam-packed skull” problem but we’ve also seemingly lost a lot of ancient human know-how and wisdom. The 2500-year old ​opening epigraph​ alone is a power punch. Then he goes on to share how Native American tribes foster nose breathing in babies by “carefully closing the baby’s lips with their fingers after each feeding. At night, they’d stand over sleeping infants and gently pinch mouths shut if they opened.” He quotes an 1800s book by a Missourian who goes to live with ​Pawnee​, ​Omaha​, ​Cheyenne​, and ​Blackfeet​ tribes and writes that “The Native Americans explained to Catlin that breath inhaled through the mouth sapped the body of strength, deformed the face, and caused stress and disease.” Btw, we’re only in Chapter 2 here. By the time you’re done you’ll be looking for your uvula in the mirror to assess your susceptibility for sleep apnea (“the Friedman tongue position scale”), maybe buying mouth tape to tape over your lips at night (Nester recommends ​3M Nexcare Durapore​—I used it last night and recommend, too!), looking for tougher foods to chew, or practicing some of the breathholding exercises mentioned later in the book or in a wonderfully detailed Appendix. I highlighted and dog-eared so much of this book and put some of my favorite pages ​here​. Highly recommended.

2. ​The Savage Detectives​ by Roberto Bolaño. A fascinating book by Chilean writer ​Roberto Bolaño​ (1953-2003) that offers endless mood and texture with an odd-angled semi-plot. I came to it in a weird way. A friend was visiting me a decade ago when he pulled this book out of his backpack, said he’d just bought it, tore through it, and wanted me to read it. Then he moved. I never read the book. I never gave it back. Soaked into the ​anti-library​! But then, in researching ​James Daunt​, I was fascinated to learn he organized his ​Daunt Books​ indie bookstore chain by … place. Place? Yeah, not by the genre, not by Dewey Decimal System, but by place. All novels, all history, all culture—there it is! Under Indonesia! Well, I have a trip to Mexico City coming so I looked up “novels taking place in Mexico City” and, wouldn’t you know it, this popped up. I cracked it open and read the first 139 pages—1 of 3 parts the book is split into and titled “Mexicans Lost In Mexico (1975)”—and found myself in a series of first-person diary entries from a 17-year-old literary poet wannabe that … maybe is Bolaño? It’s great. Earnest and eager and raunchy and rich. But then it ends with a dramatic runaway chase scene with our main character, two poets he looks up to, and a prostitute … racing away from her former pimp. And then you turn the page and you’re in Part 2 titled “The Savage Detectives (1976-1996)” and, if you’re me, you’re completely lost. We are now hearing from a cast of dozens of different voices, ‘Lincoln In The Bardo’-style (​4/2018​), as they tell a sideways-angled tale of … those two poets our protagonist was aspiring to be like/interested in in the first half. THIS GOES ON FOR 400 PAGES! Then suddenly, on Page 591, we’re thrust into Part 3 (“The Sonora Desert (1976)”) and we are suddenly…. back to the first scene! In the car! Racing from the pimp! Cue the wild ​Breaking Bad​-toned finale. Weird book. Wild book! I felt nostalgic, dizzy, confused, disgusted, engaged, lost … but I kept reading. It’s written in such casual language but so abstract in structure and form. Like some kind of weird uncle to ‘Infinite Jest.’ A helluva trip.

3. ​The Poet X​ by Elizabeth Acevédo. When I launched 3 Books six years ago I got a phone number—​1-833-READ-A-LOT​—which lets me collect voicemails from listeners. I play one at the end of every ​Chapter​. Nadia, an educator from the Mojave Desert, called at the end of ​Chapter 140 with Amy Einhorn​ to share her reflections on ​Chapter 105 with Nancy The Librarian​—in particular our discussion on getting into audiobooks. “Neil, I’d love to recommend ‘The Poet X’ by Elizabeth Acevédo,” she said. “It’s a book in verse, a novel in verse, and it’s just almost meant to be read out loud. And she reads it herself.” I picked up (i.e., ​downloaded​​ from Libro.FM​, the audiobook company which supports your local indie bookstore, which just fyi I have no formal affiliation with) this 2018 coming-of-age YA book about a Dominican teen girl in Harlem falling in love, losing and finding God, navigating relationships at home and school, and discovering her poetic voice. It really does have a slam-poetry type of flow with Acevédo’s beautiful voice running smooth: “Walking home from the train I can’t help but think Aman’s made a junkie out of me—begging for that hit, eyes wide with hunger, blood on fire, licking the flesh, waiting for the refresh of his mouth. Fiend, begging for an inhale, whatever the price, just so long as it’s real nice—real, real nice—blood on ice, ice, waiting for that warmth, that heat, that fire. He’s turned me into a fiend, waiting for his next word, hanging on his last breath, always waiting for the next next time.” Not every sentence sings like that but a lot do: “We watch YouTube highlights of the winter games, I help Aman fry eggs and sweet plantains.” It’s a short, somewhat paint-by-numbers plot that helped me fill a lot of buzzing airport time with melody.

4. ​National Audubon Society Pocket Guide: Familiar Mushrooms​. We went on a couple long family hikes last weekend. The trails were covered in so many different kinds of mushrooms. Those oyster-shaped ones on the sides of dead logs. Giant, dented-coconut shaped ones on the side of big trees. Bright red ones straight out of Mario World. I could see my kids considered them like I did: They’re probably poisonous! Don’t touch them! But the truth is, I know shit-all about mushrooms. So I grabbed this fantastic pocket-sized 190-page field guide from my grandparents-in-law’s bookshelf and flipped through it. Small enough to fit in your pocket and easy to quickly flip open and use the top-left silhouette legend to find the approximate shape of your mushroom in a few seconds. Then you fine-pick through the detailed color two-page spreads. Right side: Full color unmistakable photo of your mushroom. Left: Details like a short summary and then Identification (field marks), Edibility, Similar Species, Habitat, and Range. There are a lot of poisonous and “deadly poisonous” mushrooms in here! And a whole bunch that are delicious and could save you if/when you’re lost in the woods. Highly recommended.

5. ​Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How To Finally, Really Grow Up​ by James Hollis, Ph.D. Average lifespan right now in Japan is 84, Canada 83, England 81, US 77, China 77, India 72. Can we call it 80 roundabouts? That means the second half of your life begins while blowing out the candles on your 40th birthday. Cue mid-life crisis! Buy the convertible, get the lipo, start dating someone 20 years younger! Not so fast. Here comes poetically erudite Jungian analyst James Hollis to save you from that. Giant-minded with an in-the-clouds-and-on-the-street tone this is a masterful, inspiring, deeply soulful book I know I’ll be revisiting over and over. Hollis opens the book with a full page of questions and the headline “Your Life Is Addressing These Questions To You” with some examples being: “What gods, what forces, what family, what social environment, has framed your reality, perhaps supported, perhaps constricted it?” and “Why do you believe that you have to hide so much, from others, from yourself?” and “Why is the life you are living too small for the soul’s desire?” Biggies! His lengthy but worthwhile Intro quotes Nobel Prize nominee Andre Malraux: “The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.” Chapter 1 opens quickly with the title: “Expensive Ghosts: How Did We Get To This Point?” where Hollis makes the argument that “In the end we will only be transformed when we can recognize and accept the fact that there is a will within each of us, quite outside the range of conscious control, a will which knows what is right for us, which is repeatedly reporting to us via our bodies, emotions, and dreams, and is incessantly encouraging our healing and wholeness.” Dude goes deep. We’re in Chapter 1 here. I can’t tell you how many times I hit a rich paragraph that stunned me into stopping. Once I typed up a whole paragraph, emailed it to Leslie, and now we have it stuck up on our kitchen wall. That one comes in Chapter 6 (“The Family During The Second Half Of Life”) where Hollis writes: “What would happen to our lives, our world, if the parent could unconditionally affirm the child, saying in so many words: ‘You are precious to us; you will always have our love and support; you are here to be who you are; try never to hurt another, but never stop trying to become yourself as fully as you can; when you fall and fail, you are still loved by us and welcomed to us, but you are also here to leave us, and to go onward toward your own destiny without having to worry about pleasing us.’ How history would change!” Magnificent, deep, soul-touching with a type of density that required (for me, anyway) many small bites. But if you can handle the occasional phrase like “psychodynamic stratagems” and quite a lot of Carl Jung quotes then I suggest picking this up. (Btw: This is one of Oliver Burkeman’s 3 most formative books. Oliver’s new book ‘​Meditations For Mortals​’ just dropped and is getting ​rave reviews​. My chat with Oliver will drop on the full moon! Join us on ​Spotify​, ​Apple​, or ​YT​.)

6. ​The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft​ by Robert S. Boynton. I’m a sucker for writers interviewing writers about writing. This 21-year-old book from NYU journalism professor Robert Boynton labels that fun, jumpy, immersive style of Tom Wolfe journalism “new journalism” and then calls the 19 writers interviewed here “new new journalists.” But no matter! It’s just a great batch of dense interviews with folks like Michael Lewis, ​Susan Orlean​, and Jon Krakauer. Where do they get their ideas? How do they make connections in interviews? What does an ideal writing day look like? The book’s a bit longwinded (pot, kettle, I know) but it’s perfect for dipping and slipping in and out.

7. ​Good Birders Don’t Wear White: 50 Tips from North America’s Top Birders​ edited by Lisa White. This was another book from this community and I had to go digging on ​Thriftbooks​ to find a copy but it was worth it. There is the title advice—“trading the white birding festival T-shirt for a camo jump suit and face paint is a little extreme, but selecting clothing in neutral colors that blend with the environment can reduce the impact of birding on birds and other wildlife”—but a lot more. I learned how to “Choose a Birding Tour Carefully,” “Go Birding At Night,” “Shush and Pish," and “Use A Storm to Your Advantage,” amongst others. The book is field-guide-small and the tone is light, fun, and easy to read. Everything from feeding birds to cleaning binoculars to even drawing birds (from David Sibley himself!) is covered. A nice gift for the birder in your life.

8. ​Alfie Gets In First​ by Shirley Hughes. This is our favorite of the wonderful series of picture books created by the incredible Shirley Hughes (1927-2002) of West Kirby, England. Her bibliography includes over 50 books that have sold over 10 million copies. I still remember when Leslie and I met a wonderful children’s librarian in Toronto named Joanne who thrust this book into our hands and, since then, all of our kids have loved reading ​Alfie’s tales​ when they’re around 3 or 4. In this story the toddler Alfie does indeed get into the house before his mom and little sister and then the door latches behind him which causes a flurry of neighborhood friends to come over to try to help him out. Gentle tension, vivid drawings, and the warmth of family and community come through—as they do in all the Alfie books. Perfect before bed. Highly recommended.

9. There is no 9! Just our regular lootbag of links. ​Tim Urban​ offers a wonderful dose of awe in his Free Press article “​Why I Brought My Toddler to Watch SpaceX’s Flying Skyscraper​.” Bryan Johnson helps us ​fix our posture​. Fascinating little graphic on ​how couples met​ from 1930 to 2024. Marc Andreessen says “​trust in every major incumbent organization is on its way to zero​.” ​Shane Parrish​ has re-released his wonderful collection of ​“Great Mental Models” books​. Do your kids ​imitate​ the way you walk? Eerie poetry from Gen Z: ​“It was the damn phone.”​ What a 15-foot hurricane storm surge ​looks like​. Elizabeth Kolbert reporting on ​melting glaciers​ in Greenland. And Eric Barker shares ​5 rituals to make you a more awesome parent​.

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Interested in more of my reviews? Read my monthly book clubs or visit my Goodreads page.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - September 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Hope you’ve had a wonderful September.

Here in Toronto orange and yellow leaves are covering the roads and the evenings are getting chillier.

I shared my ​annual birthday advice​ a couple weeks ago and the algorithms liked this one with over 700,000 people reading or sharing it online now. Other members of our community of optimists have started compiling their own like ​this list​ from Australian mum-of-three Ness Quayle. Here's an excerpt and a pic she sent me and you can click to read the whole thing:

I just got another great list from ​Sera Ertan​ for her 30th birthday. She includes advice like “Explore dating outside of your type,” “Sun and sea might be enough to cure your depression," and “Learn one new skill every year.” I'll post the whole thing at ​Neil.blog​. Do you have a list of things you’ve (almost) learned? Or want to write one? Feel free to share it back with me so we can keep inspiring each other.

Thank you for hanging out with me each month and if you know others who’d like to join us just send them ​here​.

Happy reading,

Neil

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1. ​Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts​ by Oliver Burkeman. From 2006 until 2020 Oliver Burkeman wrote one of my favorite newspaper columns—the wonderfully titled “​This Column Will Change Your Life​” in The Guardian. In a lot of ways: It did. Oliver created a wonderful real-time exploration of the self-help universe from the perspective of a particularly compassionate, tart, naval-gazey Brit. After the column finished Oliver wrote ​‘Four Thousand Weeks​,’ a truly masterful offering that kind of zoomed up and over the self-help canon—bang!—and which I threw in “​The Very Best Books I Read In 2021​.” The title of that book is a reminder of the average number of weeks in a human lifetime. (4000 weeks is 76.7 years and US lifespan is ​currently​ 77.5.) Oliver has a unique perspective and he shares it in the Intro to this follow-up which comes out in 11 days and can be ordered ​right here​: “It starts from the position that you’ll never feel fully confident about the future, or fully understand what makes other people tick — and that there will always be too much to do,” he writes. Why? Not because “you’re an ill-disciplined loser, or because you haven’t read the right bestseller revealing ‘the surprising science’ of productivity, leadership, parenting, or anything else. It’s because being a finite human just means never achieving the sort of control or security on which many of us feel our sanity depends … It just means you’ll always be vulnerable to unforeseen disasters or distressing emotions, and that you’ll never have more than partial influence over how your time unfolds, no matter what YouTubers in their early twenties with no kids might have to say about the ideal morning routine.” Snap! Part poet, part diss rapper, Oliver always keeps it real. I feel like this book was like a bowl of leftover cake and whipped cream I just found in the fridge. It’s not as long or as layered as the ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ meal that preceded it. But it hits the spot! At 162 pages versus 304 the book is broken into 28 short essays meant to be read once a day over four weeks. Oliver invites us to approach the book “as a return, on a roughly daily basis, to a metaphorical sanctuary in a quiet corner of your brain, where you can allow new thinking to take shape without needing to press pause on the rest of your life, but which remains there in the background as you go through the day.” I read 6 the first chunk, then none for three weeks, then picked it back up and suddenly had gobbled 8 more. So, you know, you do you and all. The four weeks have themes—‘Being Finite,’ ‘Taking Action,’ ‘Letting Go,’ and ‘Showing Up’—and each ‘day’ has a curiosity-sparking title before a 3-5 page writeup: “Against productivity debt: On the power of a ‘done’ list,” “Develop a taste for problems: On never reaching the trouble-free phase,” and “Don’t stand in generosity’s way: On the futility of ‘becoming a better person.’” He stirs eloquent thoughts, precise quotes, and, uh, surprise cacao nibs of philosophy into something delicious. For me the size, shape, and incisive wisdom of the book recalls ‘The Art of Living’ by Epictetus (​12/2016​). A work of mastery that comes with a side-benefit of reducing anxiety about everything. Highly recommended.

2. ​Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement​ by Jane McAlevey. What will jobs look like in the future? What roles will AI displace? What industries will emerge? What roles will remain for us outnumbered humans? Makes sense things are brewing in labor. You’ve probably heard about Chris Smalls and a group of Amazon workers on Staten Island forming ​the first Amazon Workers Union​ (which, two years later,​ the company is still fighting​). Or news that after many staunchly anti-union years, ​Starbucks may be willing​ to negotiate with representatives of its 400+ unionized stores. There’s a bill on California governor ​Gavin Newsom’s desk​ this month seeking to ban employer-led anti-union meetings at work. Yet despite the bubbling: There is a ​record low​ percentage of American workers in a union today. Why? Are unions becoming ineffective? Have gig roles and freelance jobs taken over? Are turnover rates too high to organize? Have laws tilted from pro-labor to pro-corporation? There were a lot of lines about unions at the Democratic National Convention: “As President, I will bring together labor and workers…” said Kamala Harris. “We need to pass the ​PRO Act​ so that workers can organize a union and gain the decent pay and benefits they deserve,” said Bernie Sanders. This fiery, spirited, slightly disorganized 2012 book by recently deceased union organizer and Berkeley policy fellow ​Jane McAlevey​ offers an insider’s from-the-ground view of the passion, resolve, and fight necessary to organize workers in a system largely oriented to disorganize them. The book opens with a gripping tale of Florida during the ​butterfly ballot​ ​Bush v. Gore​ election crisis then veers into dramatic fighting, and infighting, over the years. There is a militant pulse in the book and also messiness, ugly politics, and sadness. A good peek into an issue gaining momentum as disparities widen around the world.

3. ​The Quentin Blake Book​ by Jenny Uglow. One of ​our values​ on reading is that “Librarians are doctors of the mind.” I can’t tell you how many books Sarah Ramsey of Book City gave me that twisted my heart the right way at the right time. (I talk to her about this ​here​.) So I was delighted to see a massive “Staff Picks” wall at the down-the-ramp front entrance of the ​High Park branch of the Toronto Public Library​. It was like a wall of vitamins! My eyes were drawn to the pink sticky note saying “Rebeca’s Pick I loved learning about this artist whose work is known often by his partnership with Roald Dahl.” Quentin Blake! Yes! Right! Kevin the Bookseller threw that particular vitamin down my throat back in ​Chapter 44​ at the Indigo bookstore he runs at Mount Sinai hospital. Rebeca is right, though. Who else still has this image lodged somewhere in the back of their brain?

But now when you see it you learn on page 90 that “By contrast… The Twits, a darker, brutal story, asked for black and white for its prison-like world, and a hard nib to give the mood (and to show Mr Twit’s beard, ‘which had to look like a lavatory brush’). The expressions speak volumes, as the couple play their cruel practical jokes—witness Mrs Twist’s alarm as she is stretched beneath gas-filled balloons, and Mr Twit’s glee as he prepared to tie another one.” Incredible, right? This book is the stories behind the drawings behind the stories. And the Dahl stuff is just one chapter! The book expands and colors in the now-91-years of genius that is Quentin Blake. From his early ​Punch​ magazine covers to nude sketches and self-portraits to giant hospital walls and darker illustrations he did to support the migrant refugee crisis. His humanitarian work was completely unknown to me and it’s beautiful. A couple years ago I stumbled on a dog-chewed dark brown hardcover first edition of ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ (​8/2024​) at ​The Monkey’s Paw​ (a must-visit bookstore if you’re in Toronto, which features the world’s first Biblio-Mat!) Incredible find, right? But when I flipped through it I realized I could never love it. It didn’t have Quentin Blake’s drawings. Seriously: What’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory without this:

This book is a succulent and engaging deep-dive into the life and work of an unstoppable artistic master. Highly recommended. (P.S. Quentin is 91 today and still drawing. If you want to experience delight I suggest you check out the ​gallery​ on his website. I wish I had a nursery to decorate with ​this one!​)

4. ​The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet​ by John Green. I love John Green but I admit I resisted this book for a couple years. “I want edgy-gushy- earnest YA! Not serious-sounding essays about … climate change?” But this is a great book. A fun book! A fast book! A book of reviews! John Green is good at reviewing things and he shares that one of his first jobs was writing endless 175-word reviews for ​Booklist​. He also points out the review has become the communication form of our time. “The medication I take to treat my obsessive-compulsive disorder has more than 1,100 ratings at Drugs.com, with an average score of 3.8. A scene in the movie adaptation of my book ‘The Fault In Our Stars’ was filmed on a bench in Amsterdam; that bench now has hundreds of Google reviews,” he writes in the Introduction. One day he told his brother he wanted to write a review of Canada Geese and the idea for this book (and the ​podcast series that preceded it​) struck: “The Anthropocene … REVIEWED,” Hank Green said. So what follows are a series of seemingly disjoint reviews of things like Halley’s Comet, Diet Dr Pepper, Sunsets, and, yes, Canada Geese, where John tells us how the bird used to be rare but is perfectly adapted to our increasingly steamrolled golf-course-covered planet. (“Thank you for paving paradise and putting up parking lots—honnnnnk, honk, honk, honk, honk.”) What emerges is a fascinating mind jumpily exploring secret histories while contemplating the status and fate of our species and planet in a fun and near-lighthearted way. In his review of ‘Scratch ‘n’ Sniff Stickers’ he takes us back into his childhood classroom, then wonderfully opines that “Humans, meanwhile, smell like the exhalations of the bacteria that colonize us, a fact we go to extraordinary lengths to conceal…”, then takes us into the 1960s-developed microencapsulation process the stickers use, borrowed from banking carbon paper, where scratching actually cracks open microcapsules of essential oils, and then he wonders how the nature of smells has changed over time. In his review of ‘The Internet’ he writes: “What does it say that I can’t imagine my life or my work without the internet? What does it mean to have my way of thinking, and my way of being, so profoundly shaped by machine logic? What does it mean that, having been part of the internet for so long, the internet is also part of me?” Of course every review ends in a rating. Canada Geese, you may understand, get 2 stars, the internet gets 3 stars, and scratch ‘n’ sniff stickers get a rare 3 and a ½. Part silly, part serious, as a rare combination of ‘thoughtful short form,’ we hereby officially add this to our ​Enlightened Bathroom Reading​ collection. Highly recommended.

5. ​Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln​ by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Carrying around this book this month was like carrying around a six foot sub on a seven foot wooden plank. I used to drive around and deliver these things 20 years ago and it was so fun. Here I am! With this giant sandwich! Big, beautiful, tasty, delicious. Of course, like the big sandwich, you can only take a couple bites at a time. Even the audiobook is 41 hours and 32 minutes and it’s not the kind of thing you can listen to at 2x. So I bit off the meat and veggies hanging out the sides first—the 16 pages of Epigraph, Contents, Introductions, and Maps followed by the 40 pages of Epilogue, Acknowledgements, Abbreviations, and Index. (I skipped the 121 pages of Notes.) THEN I took a big bite from both sides: the first chapter ‘Four Men Waiting’ and the last chapter ‘The Final Weeks’ before slowly working my way into the middle—mostly by audio jump-around on ​Libro.FM​. There are no rules to reading! (​You have the right to skip, the right to dip...​) When the story gets going you've slid down a time-traveling slide to Springfield, Illinois 164 years ago with its “multiple saloons and restaurants, seven newspapers, three billiard halls, dozens of retail stores, three military armories, and two railroad depots.” You're a fly on multiple walls meeting 51-year-old Abe as he nervously awaits news on the Republican nomination for President. The writing is wonderfully detailed. You can just picture it when Goodwin tells us Lincoln was “a familiar figure to almost everyone in Springfield, as was his singular way of walking, which gave the impression that his long, gaunt frame needed oiling. He plodded forward in an awkward manner, hands hanging at his sides or folded behind his back … He lifted his whole foot at once rather than lifting from the toes and then thrust the whole foot down on the ground rather than landing on his heel.” You like detail? Here are 757 pages of detail. The high-level story is well known: about Lincoln’s growth through poverty (“moving from one dirt farm to another”) and the establishment and challenge of practicing deep and wide-ranging leadership skills (including, of course, bringing his “team of rivals” into his cabinet) all towards helping a fractured country on many brinks. The first-ever Republican president of the US and (arguably) ​the best​. A massive, monstrous plank of deliciousness that can be feasted on for a long, long time.

6. ​The Field​ by Dave Lapp. How do you revisit, explore, and process the uglier and more painful moments of childhood? This graphic novel manages the feat of bullseye-ing in on that particular gnawing stomach stress feeling of being socially excluded as a kid. Dave Lapp doesn’t fire any darts off the board, either. The opening six-page comic in this 540-page coming-of-age graphic memoir gave me a stomach flip: our narrator David and his troublemaking pal Edward draw dirty pictures in their first or second grade class and, at Ed’s insistence, hide them on the board. When the teacher finds them—“Who hid these dirty drawings on my vocabulary board?!”—Edward immediately outs David, who gets marched to the front of the class and has the drawings pinned to his shirt, along with a letter to his mom. “Dear Mrs. Lapp, David drew these dirty pictures and showed them to the whole class, Ms. Lewis.” He starts crying, he bows his head, the teacher provokes him a bit (“DO NOT TAKE IT OFF OR I WILL KNOW!”), and when he’s finally given permission to sit back on the carpet the final scene is Edward … shuffling away from him. What a punch! That’s the vibe here. Spare drawings, accurate pain, a lot of “no, no, no, don’t do thats!”, all ultimately adding up to a slightly harrowing reconnection with the sharper emotional side of growing up.

7,8,9, and 10. ​Catwings, Catwings Return, Wonderful Alexander, and Jane On Her Own​ by Ursula K. Le Guin. I first heard about Ursula K. Le Guin back in 2020 when ​David Mitchell​ (‘Cloud Atlas,’ ​6/2019​) picked ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ (​8/2020​) as one of his 3 most formative books. That “young adult” book felt anything but to me—creepy, cryptic, eerie. There was a wet, dark, skeletal feeling in that book that felt haunting when I read it and feels haunting when I think about it now. (Incidentally I recommend this wonderful ​eight-year-old essay​ David wrote about the series.) So that backdrop is, I suppose, partly what makes the super-slim 4x40-page box set of ‘Catwings’ so surprising. This isn’t dark! It’s a story about a bunch of cats … with wings … who escape alleys, get attacked by owls, suffer rat trauma, find lost siblings, and get trapped by greedy owners with dollar signs in their eyes. Why do the cats have wings? “Mrs. Jane Tabby could not explain why all four of her children had wings. ‘I suppose their father was a fly-by-night,’ a neighbor said, and laughed unpleasantly, sneaking round the dumpster.” Those are the first two sentences of the first book. These are smoother, simpler, more straightforward stories than ‘Earthsea’ that are perfect read-a-louds with kids as young as four or five. There are a few suspenseful scenes but you’re safe in the tight embrace of an ink-flicking master and everything is gorgeously wrapped in detailed illustrations by S.D. Schindler. Looks like Ursula wrote these books throughout her sixties from the late 80s to the late 90s and they are (for good reason!) still in print today.

11. There is no 11! Just our regular look bag of links. I enjoyed cutting out and ticking off the books I’ve read and want to read in The New York Times ‘​100 Best Books of the 20th Century​.’ I am a bit of a list nut, I admit, and, btw, I’ve only read 12 of them! Thanks to Karen W for telling me about this activism ​in the world of Little Free Libraries​! I loved Ryan Holiday’s ​essay about swimming​. I want to jump in a pool right now. Listen to my now-ancient chat with Ryan at his house in Austin right ​here​. I was ​interviewed in Forbes​ last month about top happiness habits. ​Amy Einhorn​, superstar editor of ‘The Help,’ ‘Big Little Lies,’ ‘Let’s Pretend This Never Happened,’ ‘A Higher Loyalty,’ and, yes, ‘​The Book of Awesome​,’ joined me ​on 3 Books​. Adam Grant shared a ​new study​ on the danger of heavy screen use in young children. A ​nice collection​ of Kevin Kelly wisdom. I ​agree​ with Myrium Gurba. ​The real tax​ of US political season. Casey Neistat’s ​advice​ to people in their 20s. And have most major sports been ‘​figured out​’?

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Interested in more of my reviews? Read my monthly book clubs or visit my Goodreads page.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - August 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Wow, it’s suddenly September tomorrow.

Who else is feeling a little prickly-anxious about the start of school and the resulting slow grind of new routines working their way into some kind of smooth flow?

I feel that way. I just did an ​interview with Forbes​ you can check out for a bit of a happiness habit refresh. And have a ​new article on CNBC​ about doing Rose Rose Thorn Bud at night. Our new journal based on the practice ‘​Two Minute Evenings​’ sold out the first day! Took a while but new copies are now back in stock on ​Chronicle​ or ​Amazon​.

This month I loved jumping ten millenniums in the future in the bubbling, rainbow-colored wowshow of ‘​Moonbound​’ by Robin Sloan. I finished a couple bedtime read-a-louds with my kids. And in the midst of US election overwhelm I was reminded about some of what’s at stake through the masterpiece ‘​Stasiland​,’ which is a wonderfully woven “kitchen table conversation” style of journalism from behind the Berlin Wall. Plus a lot more!

Let’s keep focused on reading amidst the endless beeps and boops.

And now let’s get to the books…

Neil

PS. If you know someone who wants to read more they can join us ​here​!

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1. ​The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing​ by Melissa Bank. I’ll tell you how I ended up reading this book and then tell you what I thought. 15 years ago my nascent seven-month-old blog ‘​1000 Awesome Things​’ was nominated for ‘Best Blog’ in the world from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. I was immediately approached by a bunch of literary agents including Erin Malone, who represented Christian Lander, a fellow Torontonian who wrote a blog I loved called ‘​Stuff White People Like​’ (featuring ​#9 “Making you feel bad for not going outside”​ and ​#85 “The Wire”​). I signed with Erin and she told me she wanted to auction my blog to publishers … next week. Suddenly I was in the foreign position of interviewing editors who were somehow clamoring to publish my book. I signed with Amy Einhorn, a woman I’d never heard of, who just started an eponymous imprint I’d never heard of, within Putnam Publishing, which I’d also never heard of. But I was magnetically attracted to her vision for the book, which was different than everybody else’s. I learned everything about editing from Amy in our passionate late-night diatribe-y emails to each other, our hot-potato-ing of 300-page Word docs back and forth with 100s of comments in red down the sides, and arguing—good arguing!—about every single element along the way. I’d sit in her New York office and she’d have a variety of ‘cases’ laid out on her desk. “What do you think of 5” by 7”?” she’d say. “Too precious? Too cute?” (We went with a 5.5" by 7.5" for the record.) Or she’d say, “Neil, ‘Blowing your nose in the shower’ is out. Too frat boy! It’s a hardcover. It’s a gift book. It’s for moms.” I absolutely loved working with her. By some accounts Amy Einhorn is ​the most successful editor in the world today​ with the highest percentage of books edited that hit the New York Times bestseller list. She has a knack for sniffing out voice, for knowing what will work and what won’t and, as you can imagine, I’ve been begging her to come on ​my podcast​ for six years to ask her about her secrets. She finally acquiesced and I fly down to New York City next week. (She’s now running Fiction at Crown.) Of course, I get the 3 formative books in advance and this one—‘The Girls’ Guide To Hunting And Fishing’—was tops on her list. ‘The Girls’ Guide To Hunting And Fishing’? Uh ... yeah. I will say up front if you asked me if I wanted to read a coming-of-age romantic and sexual awakening first-person narrative from a snappy, turbo-charged Jersey-girl-turned-New Yorker through the 80s and 90s I would have potentially said “Pass!” But I loved it. This is an absolutely stunning read with strong ‘​When Harry Met Sally​’ vibes throughout. Fast, funny, twisting, turning. The title of the book makes zero sense till you get to last chapter and they even took the bold publishing step of not even printing “A Novel” on the cover to help us out—just a tiny small caps FICTION in the lower left corner. After a mildly annoying ten page flips you hit the book’s first sentence where, without any context, you’re thrust into the mind’s eye of a teen girl looking out the front window of her house: “My brother’s first serious girlfriend was eight years older—twenty-eight to his twenty.” Melissa Bank writes with a magical Claire Keegan (‘Foster,’ ​9/2023​) brand of writing I’d call “vivid sparsity.” The story is told through seven short stories that leapfrog through Jane Rosenal’s life with a wild unpredictability that feels like real life. It starts with Jane as a teen trying to understand sex and love: “My theory was that if you had breasts, boys wanted to have sex with you, which wasn’t exactly a big compliment, since they wanted to have sex anyway. Whereas if you had a beautiful face, like Julia, boys fell in love with you, which seemed to happen almost against their will. Then the sex that you had would be about love.” (page 21) Trying to understand drugs: “There was a keg, but when someone asked if we’d like a beer, Linda said, ‘I wish we could.’ I didn’t find out what she’d meant until a joint was passed to her and she handed it right off to me, saying, ‘Remember the three Ds from detox: don’t, don’t, don’t.’ I passed the joint, as though exerting heroic self-control. She said, ‘You still get flashbacks?’ ‘I think I always will,’ I said.” (page 25). There are highs. There are lows. In her mid-30s: “But I just said, ‘Yeah.’ And ‘Yeah,’ again. Even to myself, I sounded like somebody who smoked cigarettes in front of the drug store all day.” (page 171) There is death, like after a funeral: “I walked through the meadow. I sat at the picnic table. I looked hard at everything, so I wouldn’t forget. Then I picked an apple from the tree for the ride home.” (page 199). And there are endless LOLs, too: “It occurs to me that I may not be the only butterfly whose wings flutter in the presence of his stamen. After she glides off, Robert tells me that she composes music for movies and has been nominated for an Oscar. I think of my only award, an honorable mention in the under-twelve contest to draw Mr. Bubble.” (page 235). The vignettes gave me the feeling of watching a high-school volleyball game in a cramped gym. Lot of bumps, some sets, and a variety of fastballs-off-the-back-wall, just-missed-its, and a few hard, deep spikes. This is an astounding life portrait told with speed, precision, zingers, and a rare three-dimensionalization. What a stunning voice! Thank you, Amy, yet again. Highly recommended.

2. ​Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ​by Roald Dahl. Illustrated by Quentin Blake. I hated ​Beavers​. I cried to my mom every Wednesday night on our walk home from the gym at Sunset Heights Public School. I was around six years old and would be wearing blue and brown hat and blue and brown vest after spending a couple hours getting pegged repeatedly in dodge ball and failing to properly stitch badges onto felt. Needless to say I never made it to Cubs. And Boy Scouts sounded like a nightmare! But I’ll never forget my last night in my last (and first!) year at Beavers. We were led from the gym to the library where we were sat down on the pebble-filled carpet amongst the three-foot-high shelves of crinkly wrapped picture books in front a TV / VCR rack. Someone pulled out the long orange extension cord while another cracked open the plastic video case of “​Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory​” (1971) starring Gene Wilder and (thankfully!) written by Roald Dahl. I fell in love with the movie and then picked up the book and read it so many times throughout my life. (It’s definitely one of my answers to the question: “​What’s one book you read as a kid that’s still on your shelf today?​”) A couple weeks ago I read it again with my five-year-old in a unique way. I read him the first three chapters (“Here Comes Charlie,” “Mr. Willy Wonka’s Factory,” and “Mr. Wonka and the Indian Prince”). They’re fast and easy—15 pages in 14-point font with 7 drawings from the inimitable Quentin Blake mixed in—and are a perfect little gateway into the book. My son got to meet Charlie (“How d’you do? And how d’you do? And how d’you do again? He is pleased to meet you.”), hear about the fabled factory, and get the bizarre sideways subplot (understandably struck from the film!) about Indian mogul “Prince Pondicherry” who has Mr. Wonka build a Taj Mahal-type joint out of chocolate but after taking a nap during a “very hot day with a boiling sun… woke up to find himself swimming around in a huge brown sticky lake…” So that got my 5-year-old into it. Then Leslie and I had to stuff the Odyssey for a three-hour-long drive so we downloaded the 2013 wonderfully one-man-acted by Douglas Hodge audiobook and noticed it was … 3 hours and 18 minutes. Perfect! How many audio books are that short? Dahl is such a wizard of economy. So we listened the whole way and it entranced us all. I was in the Sunset Heights library again—seeing the factory with a new perspective, new glint, new peek through the window. Then when we arrived at our rental place on a lake in smalltown Ontario with three chapters left. Which was perfect for me to read to him before bed. Btw: Since being tipped off by ​Latanya and Jerry​ on the ​Bronx Bound Books Bus​ I always recommend ​Libro.FM​ for audio books. (​Here’s the link to Charlie​.) I don’t have any affiliation with the company but I love that they have all the same audiobooks but give their profits to the indie bookstore of your choosing. Right now I’m supporting my friends at ​Mable’s Fables​, a wonderful children’s bookstore in Toronto. This is a story I can read again and again and again. Highly recommended.

3. ​Why Are People Into That? A Cultural Investigation of Kink​ by Tina Horn. “Kink-positive, for sure,” Sarah said. “That’s like my first or second thing.” She was behind the counter of her coffee shop in an otherwise-treacly patch of Little Italy. It was a couple years ago and we were talking about criteria we were looking for in a therapist. I hadn’t heard the phrase again until I saw this book sitting on the front table of the new ​Indigo Rideau Centre​ in Ottawa. I browsed the Table of Contents, could feel internal aversions and curiosities, and knew I should probably pick it up to learn more. There are nine chapters and all of them go 20-pages deep on the philosophy, history, personal history, and what-I-think-might-be-happening-heres of a specific fetish like ‘Feet,’ ‘Spanking,’ ‘Consensual Nonconsent,’ ‘Cash,’ ‘Orgies,’ and ‘Bimbofication,’ which I learned is “a fetish activity in which a person of any gender is transformed into a bubbly, insatiably-horny, empty-headed, smooth-brained, fun-loving, hyperfeminine creature.” She shares how in cartoons on the topic “breasts explode out of blouses, cappuccinos become frappucinos, white lab coats give way to cinched corsets, and brows once furrowed in thought are smoothed.” There is … a lot here. And I love how it all opens: with Tina flashing back 15 years to the 2000s to her hometown of Oakland when she runs smack into her high school boyfriend outside the movie theater—the guy she’d “first had orgasms with” when they weren’t at “swimming practice, watching Fight Club, or smoking cloves outside the nearest city’s midnight movie festivals”—and then proceeds to tell him that she’s now a professional dominatrix. To which he replies: “I always knew you’d *get into* that stuff.” Tina Horn is a ​#1 Apple Podcast host​ and ​Lambda Literary​ fellow who writes with a fearless and breezy-intellectual blogging tone that calls to mind ​Mark Manson​. She says, “This book grew out of the project that began with my podcast, inviting readers far and wide to join a sociocultural investigation in which kink is the artifact in question, the text being analyzed—a deep dive into all manner of erotic fantasies and activities, blending pop culture, history, and personal narrative.” In Chapter 1 on feet she wonderfully tilts the mirror onto how kinks and fetishes are viewed by our culture today. She talks about a ‘Sex and the City’ episode with Miranda having a relationship with a shoe salesman who, by the end of the episode, “bites his tie, breathes heavily, and seems to comically orgasm in his pants from merely placing shoes on her bare feet.” She also recounts a 2019 “smirking like he can barely contain himself” Jimmy Kimmel teasing Margaret Qually on his show about how her feet are featured by presumed-weirdo-fetishist ​Quentin Tarantino​ in ‘​Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood​.’ The book reads as a manifesto and call-to-arms seeking to rally people towards “a new code of sexual ethics based on imagination, curiosity, and communication. An ethic that abolishes the thought-policing (along with the long history of literal policing) of erotic ideas, fantasies, and tastes.” As Tina writes: “Every person reading this has, at some point in their lives, felt a longing for an embodied experience of pleasure or particular configuration of companionship that was roundly suppressed by their inner cop.” Explore the limits of your inner cop with this brave, challenging, insightful, researched-based, story-driven exploration.

4. ​All Fours​ by Miranda July. There was a funny scene in our house last month where two shipments arrived the same day, from the same place (​Indigo​!), with the same book. I heard there was a new Miranda July book and since reading her mind-bending ‘No One Belongs Here More Than You’ (​3/2022)​ I’d been a fan. (That was one of the 3 most formative books from ​Daniels​, filmmakers behind ‘​Everything, Everywhere All At Once.​’) I didn’t know who Miranda was or what else she wrote but that name—Miranda July!— was just attached to a delicious meal my brain had eaten. ​Leslie​ read it first and it was fun watching her emotional ups and downs with the book over the past couple weeks. Here comes her Leslie’s Pick now: “When I saw ‘All Fours’ by Miranda July recommended in ​The Cap​, a newsletter I subscribe to and appreciate for its thought-provoking and compassion-growing take on parenting teens, as a great summer read on motherhood and intimacy, I ordered it right away. The story follows a 45-year-old woman trying to find her next big work project, craving space away from her mundane life with her child and husband right at the same time that she aches for the beauty of it, struggling to hear her own desires for intimacy and pleasure, and then acting on her desires. It definitely captured all my attention while I read it in how brutally honest, candid, and racy it was. Some parts I found deeply resonant and poignant about what it’s like to be a mother and an almost middle-aged woman in today’s society, reminding me of the wonderful ‘Wild and Sleepless Nights’ (​1/2024​). Other parts were much more shocking and radical and peppered the book with surprising twists and at times laugh-out-loud absurdity. However, it makes sense to me that in the acknowledgments July explains that she conducted several conversations with women to inform the book and its theme of what it’s like to be a woman in perimenopause, because the common humanity, common bittersweetness, of being a 40-something-year-old woman rings through throughout.”

5. ​Goodbye, Columbus​ by Philip Roth. I mentioned Amy Einhorn in my first review this month and this is another of her formative books. The entire time I was reading this book—my third-ever Philip Roth after ‘The Human Stain’ (​6/2017​) and ‘American Pastoral’ (​8/2017​)—I kept thinking: “This was written in 1959? Seriously?” It is Roth’s first book and in a sparse 136 pages he tells a little small-but-feels-big romantic summer love affair between a Jersey college boy and the snobby Radcliffe girl from a posh family who he meets at the club’s swimming pool. (First sentence: “The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses.”) There is 1950s phone-call flirting, 1950s house-dates with siblings, and yes, as per the cover, some fuzzy-scene pool sex (“Then, in a moment, it was the sun who kissed us both, and we were out of the water, too pleased with each other to smile. Brenda shook the wetness of her hair onto my face and with the drops that touched me I felt she had made a promise to me about the summer, and, I hoped, beyond.”) I love the blurb about Philip Roth on the back cover from Saul Bellow: “Unlike those of us who come howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, teeth, speaking coherently.” We see this all over the book like on page 19: “We came back to the chairs now and then and sang hesitant, clever, nervous, gentle dithyrambs about how we were beginning to feel towards one another. Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them—at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. We whipped our strangeness and newness into a froth that resembled love, and we dared not play too long with it, talk too much of it, or it would flatten and fizzle away.” Not bad, right? Oh, anyone else need to look up ​dithyramb​? That would be: “a usually short poem in an inspired wild irregular strain.” I loved the book and it was also wonderful reading something with a first-person narrator named Neil! Even spelled the same way! Know any other Neil-books? I don’t! I’ll take it! PS to writers: If you feel like being intimated check out the first sentence of Roth’s biography from the inside flap: “In the 1990s Philip Roth won America’s four major literary awards in success: the National Book Critics Circle Award for ‘Patrimony’ (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for ‘Operation Shylock’ (1993), the National Book Award for ‘Sabbath’s Theater’ (1995), and the Pulitzer Price in fiction for ‘American Pastoral’ (1997).” Not a bad six years, Phil! Great, quick, powerful read. I’m also adding this to our list of ​Great Books Under 150 Pages​.

6. ​Moonbound​ by Robin Sloan. This is the book I spent the most time with this month and it felt like riding a rainbow-speckled rocketship. I had heard great things about Robin Sloan’s ‘​Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore​’ and subscribe to ​his wonderful email list​, which he publishes every 29-and-a-half days, and which I just ​reprinted​ a little excerpt from last month. Then I got a text from reader-extraordinaire ​Michael Bungay-Stanier​ (‘​The Coaching Habit​’) who said “Have you read Robin Sloan’s new book? Mate, it’s so good. He’d be a great guest for ​3 Books​.” The feeling of this book is like the front cover image above twisting into a kaleidoscope of images again and again and again. I fell into this book like almost nothing else and I simultaneously had no idea what was going on and couldn’t wait to find out what happened next. There are talking beavers. Talking swords! Strange video games. And ever-expanding worlds with wizards, who maybe aren’t really wizards, and oh—the entire book is narrated by a microscopic AI-type chronicler, who’s been in many different lives across the millenniums, but who now sits in our protagonist’s left shoulder. This book is—delightful. Mesmerizing. Far, far away. A kind of jacked up ‘Star Wars’ meets ‘Cloud Atlas’ featuring Willy Wonka and Mad Hatter types with occasional moments of poignancy and reflection that let you see, and see around, our endlessly twisting lives together. A big, loud, cymbal crash of a book. Highly recommended.

7. ​Little House on the Prairie​ by Laura Ingalls Wilder. For me this book went from great to slow to upsetting. I’d heard of ‘Little House on the Prairie’ for years but it wasn’t till ​Gretchen Rubin​ tipped me off to the prequel ‘Little House In the Big Woods’ (​4/2024​) that I cracked the series. That Big Woods has become a mandatory read-a-loud in our house for kids around age five. It’s the perfect visual tableau of a not-that-long-ago yesteryear that gently introduces conversations around things like guns, living off the land, getting attacked by cougars, and, of course, playing catch with pig bladders. My 5-year-old wanted to read the second of the seven book series next and I went hunting for a used copy that was illustrated by Garth Williams. (Note: If you’re buying ‘Little House in the Big Woods’ or ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ make sure you get the ones illustrated by Garth Williams. They really bring it to life!) This 1935 book opens strong: “A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.” It gave me some ​Aldo Leopold​-like experience of observing nature and I felt like was right there in front of the crisp fires, raging rivers, or getting scolded by ​Blue Jays​ for taking berries from the bush. But as the book goes on there is more tension with Indians and characters are introduced and views espoused that sound ghastly. I’m against censoring old books but geez—the views are so racist and ugly. Indians are depicted as characters who create trouble, walk into your home, and steal whatever they want. Characters swing by their little house on the prairie and offer wisdom like “Land knows, they’d never do anything with this country themselves. All they do is roam around over it like wild animals. Treaties or no treaties, the land belongs to folks that’ll farm it. That’s only common sense and justice.” (page 211) When Laura asks Pa what’s happening he explains: “When white settlers come into a country, the Indians have to move on. The government is going to move these Indians farther west, anytime now. That’s why we’re here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick. Now do you understand?” (page 237) No, don’t understand. In fact I was so horrified I stopped reading my son the book and we moved on to ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’ What books do you recommend—for me, or my kids—that better illuminate the American indigenous experience? Definitely don’t suggest this one.

8. ​Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall ​by Anna Funder. A fascinating book I would never have read if it wasn’t suggested to me by Oliver Burkeman (author of ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ (​8/2021​) and the great newsletter ​The Imperfectionist​). After World War II Germany was broken up by the ​Berlin Declaration​ and four years later, in 1949, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was formed, better known as East Germany. The Orwellian communist country existed for forty years until the fall of the Berlin Wall. And who ran the GDR? The Stasi, the “internal army by which the government kept control” and whose job was to “know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around.” Sound a bit like Google? But this wasn’t electronic surveillance and tracking everyone’s phone. It was 90,000 people officially working for the secret police along with 170,000 (!) unofficial full-time collaborators. Somebody worked for the Stasi at every pub, factory, and hall you walked into. What did they do? Many things. Wild things! They had jars and jars of thousands of people’s underwear, as one example. They collected ‘smell samples’ of people (different than the underwear collections) and used them to implicate them in crimes. Anna interviews a woman who tried to climb the Berlin wall on New Year’s Eve at age 16 and gets thrown in a horrifying prison for a year and a half. And she even interviews ex-members of the Stasi themselves. A vivid and frightening tale of the devastating potential of totalitarianism. I put this book up there with the wonderful ‘Nothing To Envy’ by Barbara Demick which casts a glowing spotlight onto North Korea today.

9. There is no nine! Just our regular loot bag of links. I mentioned it at the top but I have new pieces up on Forbes—​Part 1!​ ​Part 2!​—and ​CNBC​. And my new journal ‘​Two Minute Evenings​’ is back in stock on ​Chronicle​, ​Amazon.com​, and ​Amazon.ca​. If you grabbed a copy, leave a review! Maria Popova blew me away with her 40th birthday post on The Marginalian: ‘​An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days​.’ (She ​even created amazing cards​ of them... I got a pack and love them!) I love ​Lenore Skenazy​ and her ​Let Grow Movement​ and Leslie and I loved her new piece on ​Jonathan Haidt​’s After Babel Substack called ‘​How Phones Are Making Parents The Anxious Generation​.’ Read it! Share it! I found ​this Twitter string​ interesting from a product manager who used to work on Google Maps responding to someone suggesting “Google Maps needs a feature for the nicest way not the fastest way.” An ancient ​Microsoft X-Box ad​ that still sits in my brain. Dan Go gives us ​11 great microworkouts​ on those days you’re too busy to get a full workout in. (And check out his great ​newsletter​ if you don’t get it!). I really enjoyed ​this conversation between Scott Galloway and Rich Roll​. And, finally, I like this fun helping-you-find-books site ​Shepherd​ and just pasted ​a few of my favorites​ on there, too. Did you make it all the way down here? This book club is 4459 words so I say kudos! Thanks for a great chat about books! And remember to email anytime to let me know what you've loved reading lately...

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Interested in more of my reviews? Read my monthly book clubs or visit my Goodreads page.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - July 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Hope you’re having a great July.

Big news: Leslie and I have ​a new book​ out next week! A journal from Chronicle Books called ‘​Two Minute Evenings​’ which follows up ‘​Two Minute Mornings​’ with our nighttime ritual of playing “Rose Rose Thorn Bud.” I first wrote about RRTB seven years ago in ​The Star​ and then ​shared it on the TV​. I put a longer review below and you can order it at ​Chronicle​, ​Bookshop​, or ​Amazon​.

But before the reviews! I've been thinking about something else. A few days ago I drove my 8-year-old over the border to Lewiston, New York to see my favorite band: The Flaming Lips! We got all dressed up and raced to the front and sang and pumped our fists the whole time. With 5000 people outside on the grass ​under giant pink robots and exploding cannons of confetti​ I felt a deep sense of what Emile Durkheim called ‘collective effervescence’—that shared harmony we feel when we’re actually physically together and our energy is lining up.

We need so much more of this! So much more. Places to connect, feel each other, *fuel* each other—it’s what life’s all about. And, sure: Hard these days! So hard. We've been pulling away. Books like ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt (​04/2024​ + my fave pages ​here​) and ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ by Shoshana Zuboff (​05/2023​) are warning us of the perils of our spiking modern tech-driven loneliness—which 1 in 2 American adults suffer from and which is ​worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day​!—while books like ‘Dancing In The Streets’ by Barbara Ehrenreich (​6/2023​ + my fave pages ​here​) and Brené Brown’s new podcast series (more below!) are helping us slowly find our way back.

Years ago I put '1 weird project / 1 new experience’ ​in my monthly dashboard​ and this month my fifth Lips show, and first-ever concert with my son, definitely counted. ​Wayne Coyne​ always generates deep awe, gratitude, and love in the crowd. But next month? I need to find some 'collective effervescence' elsewhere.

And, if it’s helpful, I’ll challenge you to do the same.

Now ... let’s get to the books!

Neil

PS. If you know someone who wants to read a bit more they can join us by signing up ​right here​!

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1. ​Two Minute Evenings​ by Neil Pasricha and Leslie Richardson. I grew up feeling anxious a lot. Can you tell? I still feel those feelings, but I’ve worked through a good deal. For me a big part of the working through it has been putting in place a set of ruthlessly simple practices to stay more connected, positive, and happier. You know most: ​I read books​. ​I avoid news​. ​I get outside​. ​I call friends​. ​I write a daily awesome thing​. ​I dress up in blonde wigs and go to concerts​. ​I lock my phone downstairs​ before I go to bed. I do ​two-minute mornings​ when I wake up. And Leslie and I do a two-minute ​Rose Rose Thorn Bud​ practice at dinner with our kids—or, later, while flossing, or before turning out the lights. I by no means invented these practices but have come to shape and rely on them. '​Two Minute Mornings​' is simply answering “I will let go of…”, “I am grateful for…”, and “I will focus on…” before getting up and looking at my phone. ‘Two Minute Evenings’ is us taking a question Leslie grew up connecting over with her family: “What’s your Rose, Thorn, and Bud today?” We added another Rose to force our minds to playback two highlights, then make space to share and listen to each other’s moment of stress, and finish with a bud—or something we’re looking *forward* to. ‘Two Minute Evenings’ comes out next week and we wrote an Introduction ​here​, discuss the science and research ​here​, and posted our own filled-out pages of the journal ​here​. Chronicle created stunning packaging—a really ​thick​, ​fancy​ ​navy blue hardcover​ with ​ribbon bookmark​—and by turning the practice into “something that sits on your shelf” we hope it becomes a reminder to, you know, actually do it. To focus on the good and let go of the hard at the end of the day. For you, your family, or as a gift for someone you love. Here’s our ​website for the book​ and you can order from ​Chronicle​, ​Bookshop​, or ​Amazon​.

2. ​The World Without Us​ by Alan Weisman. We will spew more planet-altering carbon into our atmosphere this year than any other year in history. Same as last year. Same as the year before. Even though we see what's happening: ​species going extinct​, ​countries going underwater​, ​insane heat waves everywhere​. I recently read ‘Reason In A Dark Time’ by Dale Jamieson (​02/2024​) and that wonderful and wonderfully dense 2014 Oxford University Press book explained in great detail the last 50 years of our climate fuckuppery. It was a perfect backgrounder to this book which crystal balls the next 50 through a blunt thought experiment: “What would happen to the planet if humans simply disappeared?” Well-researched, deeply scientific, long-range answers are helpfully told in a simple, witty, and sometimes dark story by Alan Weisman. Want a couple high level takeaways? Sure, let's start with good news: we have successfully delayed Earth’s next ice age—which should be happening any day now!—by at least 15,000 years. Bad news? We did this by heating up the atmosphere to levels that will wipe out most plants and animals—potentially including us. The chapter on birds had me weeping. (Don’t get me started on cats!) It’s impossible to read this book and not start making changes. Time listed this book as their #1 Non-Fiction Book of 2007. Big thanks to Toronto muralist ​Nick Sweetman​ for tipping me off to this one. Highly recommended.

3. ​Point Your Face At This​ by Demetri Martin. A man lays on his back on the floor under a piano with his right arm reaching up to play the keys and his left arm disappearing underneath it—the caption reads: “Accordion player tries piano.” A set of three flags is drawn with the half-mast flag labelled "someone died," the full-mast flag labelled "no one died," and the blank flagless pole labelled "flagpole operator died." A Venn diagram is shown with two circles labelled "candy" and "maracas" with a small overlapping shaded area labeled "Tic Tacs." These are just a few of the hundreds of single-panel screw-eyed modern Far Side strips produced by comic genius Demetri Martin. I first read this book years ago (​1/2018​) and loved revisiting it after laugh-hooting on a flight watching Demetri’s wonderful new Netflix special ‘​Demetri Deconstructed.​’ (If you haven’t seen his 2018 Netflix special ‘​The Overthinker,​’ I might start with that first.) Add this one to our ​Enlightened Bathroom Reader collection​, too. Highly recommended.

4. ​Same As Ever: A Guide To What Never Changes​ by Morgan Housel. Most things today suffer from zoom-in mentality. We are looking so up-close, so minute-by-minute, that grander zoom-outs feel impossible. How often does the top headline change on CNN or The New York Times? Five times a day? Never mind the endless “for you” scrolls of social media that successfully mine our attention by feeding us an ever-titillating version of now. Enter this grandly visioned book of 23 stories by investor and award-winning writer Morgan Housel (​‘The Psychology of Money’​). He details what partly inspired him to write it in ​this 2017 blog post​ which discusses Jeff Bezos talking years ago about Amazon focusing on lower prices and faster shipping because those things won’t change over the long run. What else won’t change? A few gems from the book include: “We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises—which tend to be all that matter,” “The world is driven by forces that cannot be measured,” “Stories are always more powerful than statistics.” Morgan’s writing is a such a pleasure to read—simple stories, short chapters, counterintuitive takeaways. Morgan is a giant mind and his ability to distill into simple is ​Tim Urban​-like. This book goes down smooth. I need to keep revisiting it to avoid getting sucked back into the abyss of now.

5. ​Little Shrew​ by Akiko Miyakoshi. Did you read the ‘Frog and Toad’ books growing up? My kids love them. This 70-page book is structured similarly as a series of everyday vignettes in the life of an animal who lives like a human. This book has more of a grown-up vibe—nothing dramatic happens but its celebration of the melancholic beauty of the simple, the ordinary, is transfixing. A deep understanding of the nothingness and everythingness of life comes through. Little Shrew takes the subway to work. Little Shrew buys a bun on the way home. Little Shrew finds a poster by a dumpster. Little Shrew decorates his apartment before his friends visit. A beautiful, quiet, tranquil existence is depicted through mesmerizingly detailed pencil, charcoal, and acrylic art from the talented Akiko Miyakoshi who “lives, writes, draws, and dreams at the foot of beautiful mountains in Japan.”

6. ​The Idea of You​ by Robinne Lee. And now it’s time for this month Leslie’s Pick: "Let’s be real: sometimes you just need an indulgently juicy summer read that keeps you up too late and lying in the sun longer than you usually would. What really sold me on picking up this book was the 'Soon to be a major motion picture' sticker on the front! No book guilt, no book shame is, after all, the ​first value listed on ​​3 Books​. As my Mom believed when she handed me ​Baby-Sitters Club​ after Baby-Sitters Club to devour the summer I was 10, if you’re reading, you’re reading! Well, let me tell you, I was DEFINITELY reading, faster than I’ve read any book since 'The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo' (​8/2023​), with all the romantic escapades and hot and steamy sex scenes in 'The Idea of You' by Robinne Lee. This is the story of a 40-year-old mom who gets picked up by her daughter’s favorite pop star and then an indulgently delicious secret love affair unfolds. Definitely not acclaimed literature but so hit the spot for me!"

7. ​Fuccboi​ by Sean Thor Conroe. On page 65 of this ​autofiction​ literary debut by Sean Thor Conroe, the main character, also named Sean Thor Conroe, says “Dude, I don’t give a shit about MFA programs. I’m not interested in writing for people who already read. Who consider themselves ‘literary.’ More ‘literature’ means more insulated, masturbatory bullshit completely irrelevant to the culture. I’m tryna write for people who don’t read. Who don’t give a shit about books.” Wow. That’s a tough book to write and yet—he seems to pull it off? A bookseller at the Junction location of ​Type Books​ handed me this after I told him I was looking for a fast-paced novel in the vein of ‘A Fraction of the Whole’ (​2/2023​) or ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ (​4/2018)​. And it was fast-paced. Sometimes I wanted to toss it, sometimes I couldn’t put it down. The book is written as some kind of frenetic, pulsing lucid dream as the main character wrestles with poverty, illness, drug use, relationships, and … writing this book. The whole thing is a bit meta but the language, voice, and tone are seductive right from the opening sentence: “Got into a thing with the Fresh Grocer lady over coffee filters.” Takes place in the fringes of Philadelphia in 2017, and while not a ton *happens* the style and pace endlessly delivers. The closest book I can compare it to in tone is ‘A Million Little Pieces’ by ​James Frey​ (​9/2017​). Footnote: While researching the book afterwards I see that there’s been a bit of a literary dustup between Conroe and an author named Sam Pink. You can read their blog posts back and forth ​here​ and ​here​. A real get-out-of-your-brain book and a truly original piece of art.

8. ​The Orange and Other Poems​ by Wendy Cope. “The day he moved out was terrible / That evening she went through hell / His absence wasn’t a problem / But the corkscrew had gone as well.” A tiny book full of tiny poems that carry bits of whimsy. A great gateway drug to poetry, if you find it can be a bit daunting. This is about as un-daunting as poetry gets. In the title track ‘The Orange’ she writes: “At lunchtime I bought a huge orange— / The size of it made us all laugh. / I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave— / They got quarters and I had a half. / And that orange, it made me so happy, / As ordinary things often do / Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park. / This is peace and contentment. It’s new. / The rest of the day was quite easy. / I did all the jobs on my list / And enjoyed them and had some time over. / I love you I’m glad I exist.”

9. Nine! There is no nine. But I did want to shine a spotlight on what Brené Brown is up to right now. First it seemed like she disappeared! Last year she was suddenly off all social media—just ... gone. La disparue! Which wouldn't be a big deal if she wasn't such a strong, positive, galvanizing force for millions of people amidst the social media cesspool for so long. But then at the beginning of this year she put out ​this incredible essay​ sharing why. It begins: "My mom died on Christmas morning." She's ​relaunched her site​ and began an incredible ​podcast series​ (​Spotify​, ​Apple​) about "living beyond human scale." On the drive home from The Flaming Lips concert last week, I binged the first couple episodes with ​Esther ("Es-tare") Perel​ and ​Dr. William Brady.​ Brené and Esther talk about the 'collective effervescence' phenomenon, too. She's doing this wonderfully challenging and deep swerve exploring the costs and challenges of living as we're living—this fast-paced, relentless, everything-everywhere-all-at-once moment. Do check it out. I admit I still find myself still thinking about ​wisdom she gave Leslie and me​ when we sat down with her a few years ago—you ​can listen on YouTube here​. And if after listening to Brené you want to keep hanging out auditorily—you know I love our long drives and nature walks together—check out our recent conversations with ​Jonathan Franzen​ and, just a few days ago, ​Maria Popova​. Maria’s site ​The Marginalian​ has given me joy for nearly two decades and I find her such a one-woman force of beauty against the endless spew of bad news. Join 3 Bookers around the world right here on ​Apple​, ​Spotify​, or ​YouTube​.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - June 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Hope you’ve had a wonderful June.

Yesterday was the ​last day of school​ here in Toronto.

I’ve been encouraged by school boards like ​Greenwood​ and ​Los Angeles​ coming out with cell phone bans in the wake of books like ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt (my review ​here​, my favorite pages ​here​ and ​here​).

If you’re looking for more encouragement to run from screens to pages check out my new deep dive chat with ​Jonathan Franzen​ on ​Apple​, ​Spotify​, or ​YouTube​.

Up here we're getting set for lots of family time—which means lots of reading time—and I’m packing a giant duffle bag full of books. Heavy! Back-jabby! But nothing beats setting up a little bookshelf wherever you land.

Thanks for landing here with me this month.

Now let’s get to the books…

Neil

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1. ​Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder​ by Salman Rushdie. “Dad, is that fiction or non-fiction?” my son asked while staring at the freaky 3D blade popping out the cover of this book as it lay on the floor beside my bed. “Uh, non-fiction…”, “But it says attempted murder?”, “Yeah…”, “As in somebody tried to kill him?”, “Yeah…”, “What did he do?”, “Uh….well….” I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t really know the details. So I looked into it. Salman Rushdie was born 1947 in Bombay to an Indian ​Kashmiri Muslim​ family. At 17 he moved to England for boarding school before getting a degree at Cambridge and starting to write novels in his 20s. Wild novels! Magic realism on steroids. The plot of ​his first book​ is about “a young Native American man who receives the gift of immortality by drinking a magic fluid who then wanders the earth for 777 years 7 months and 7 days searching for his immortal sister and exploring identities…” Not exactly light reading! Rushdie says he was influenced by books like Mikhail Bulgakov’s 'The Master and the Margarita' (​6/2021​). But it was his fourth novel, ‘The Satanic Verses,’ published in 1988, that prompted the ​fatwa he is likely​ most famous for. It’s about two Indian Muslim actors flying to England on a plane that gets hijacked by Sikh separatists. The plane explodes! But the two are—magical realism style—miraculously saved before being turned into other beings who then, for the rest of the book, alternate between real life and dream sequences. In one of the dream sequences the prophet Muhammed is depicted and the so-called "​satanic verses​" from the Quran play a role in the plot. The book was hailed by literary critics as a masterpiece and simultaneously considered blasphemy. 10,000 people in Pakistan gathered to burn the book. The Indian Prime Minister banned it. Six months after the book came out the Ayatollah of Iran issued a “fatwa” on Salman Rushdie. “I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill him without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr, Allah willing.” He offered a $6 million prize. Margaret Thatcher’s British government put Rushdie into hiding. The Italian and Japanese translators of ‘The Satanic Verses’ were both stabbed—​one to death​. A wild and near-unbelievable story that died down through the 90s and 2000s, allowing Rushdie to leave hiding and live a more normalish life. But then, decades later, as he puts it in the opening sentence of this book: “At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the amphitheater in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keep writers safe from harm.” So begins this harrowing, absorbing 209-page memoir that reflects on the incident, the attacker, the state of politics and free speech in the world, and often just feels like a wild conversation between you and an exceptional man lucky to be alive. Rushdie talks about “experiencing the best and worst of human nature simultaneously,” talks about what losses around privacy and dignity feel like, discusses the importance of art and free speech and religious freedom. Honest and captivating. Highly recommended. (P.S. I just took pictures and posted my favorite pages from ​the book right here​.)

2. ​Owl Babies​ written by Martin Waddell and illustrated by Patrick Benson. We share a fear of abandonment. Being left alone without care—I’m sure it’s one of the root emotions from that pre-memory space of moving from being fully enclosed by our parent to being unenclosed in a suddenly brighter, colder, louder place. This 1992 picture book is essentially a captivating poem with deep-feeling illustrations that scratch and eventually soothe that ancient scab. Three baby owls awaken in a dark forest to find Owl Mother is GONE. (“Where’s Mummy?” asked Sarah. “Oh my goodness!” said Percy. “I want my mummy!” said Bill.) In vivid, dark “from the nest” illustrations the owls get curious, introspective, and brave on the branch together, before anxiety sets in. (“Suppose she got lost,” said Sarah. “Or a fox got her!” said Percy. “I want my mummy!” said Bill.) And then, in a dramatic two-page spread, just before the story finishes, when the tension is at max boil she—well, I don’t want to spoil the ending. But if you must know, you can have the whole book ​read to you on YouTube​. Please curl up on a carpet before hitting play. The publisher says it’s for Ages 2-4 but, as usual, I’m 40 years older and loved it. Highly recommended.

3. ​Born A Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood​ by Trevor Noah. Trevor Noah was 32 when he put out this 2016 memoir telling the fast-paced story of his remarkable childhood. This book is refreshingly free of anything recent—no behind the scenes at the Daily Show stories!—but rather a deep zoom into South Africa in the 80s and 90s from the perspective of a mixed-race kid with a hustling single mom. The book’s 'epigraph' is the 1927 South African Immorality Act which was created “To prohibit illicit carnal intercourse between Europeans and natives and other acts in relation thereto” and then Trevor chiming in about it: “Where most children are proof of their parents’ love, I was the proof of their criminality.” He grows up in marathon church crawl Sundays, is thrown out of moving vehicles by his mom to escape gangsters, and is “five or six” when ​Nelson Mandela is released from prison​ and violence erupts around him. “The triumph of democracy over apartheid is sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets.” Mesmerizing and charming book told in long, sweeping stories that have a ​The Moth​-like mix of real, strange, and profound mixed into a wonderfully sweet-and-sour slurp. Highly recommended.

4. ​The Women​ by Kristen Hannah. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick, a book read and recommended by the woman I’m lucky to be married to: “One of my favorite books of all time is '​The Nightingale​' by Kristen Hannah, so when my book club picked her new book for our June read I ordered it before even reading anything about it. Equally captivating, similarly a 'her-story of a major historical event,’ speckled with romance, and braided with themes of female resistance, strength, and determination amidst war, trauma, mental health challenges, and family drama, this book definitely delivers! The epic story follows Frankie as she enlists for Vietnam as a naive and hopeful nurse and dives into the graphic traumas of soldiers dying in her arms, dressing amputations and chest wounds amidst nearby explosions, and tending to innocent women and children injured by the war. She evolves into an incredible skilled front line worker and the story then follows her into her post-war challenges and beyond for a hopeful finish."

5. ​The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been​ by Jake Berman. “Nobody’s gonna drive this lousy freeway when they can take the Red Car for a nickel.” That’s the wonderful epigraph of this book from Eddie Valiant in ‘​Who Framed Roger Rabbit​.’ Sadly, Eddie was dead wrong, as Jake Berman tells us in his Introduction when he says “I had assumed that cars in Los Angeles where just a fact of life, like beaches, palm trees, and tacos. But that wasn’t case at all. Gridlock was a choice that the people of Los Angeles had made.” A fascinating and fascinatingly obsessive book about the dream of mass transit to clear traffic and move people around futuristic metropolises and how that dream was chucked in the waste bin after World War II so we could all sit in cars in traffic jams instead. Jake zooms in on 23 North American cities and tells us stories like “a short history of a never used subway” (Cincinnati), “the mob takeover of twin city rapid transit” (Minneapolis-St. Paul), “the only city to open a subway and then close it” (Rochester), and “the subway as political football” (my hometown of Toronto). There are no winners here! Every city gets their own 10ish page red-faced history of the highs and (mostly) lows of their subway system—racist votes, illegal campaigns and all—complete with endless colorful pages of beautiful subway maps and old posters. Ultimately about what might have been, the book does an incredible job of filling in a history too few people know about.

6. ​Is This ‘One Of Those Days,’ Daddy?​ by Lynn Johnston. For 29 years from 1979 to 2008 Lynn Johnston created a cartoon strip unlike any other with the contemporary vaguely suburban, vaguely Canadian family of Ellie, John, Michael, and Elizabeth Patterson growing up in real-time alongside readers. The strip was read in thousands of papers, meaning it had one of those pre-social media followings in the millions. If you grew up with “For Better Or For Worse” you know how special it was—with simple strips complemented by weightier issues like midlife crises, divorces, bullying, and the coming out of Lawrence, Michael’s best friend, in 1992—more than a decade before Spain became the first country in the world to legalize gay marriage. (Even today ​only 20% of the world’s population lives somewhere gay marriage is legal​.) The strip isn’t all heavy though! Far from it. It’s both an artistic gem, with characters feeling lifelike as they invisibly grow from children to adults with children over the years, and a light-sided reflection of home life mirroring the values of the time. On Page 52 Ellie says no to her son Michael nagging her for treats in the grocery store for six panels before caving in and then concluding in a thought-bubble in the last panel with wide-open eyes of regret “Sometimes it’s a toss-up between being consistent or remaining sane.” Like Bill Watterson, Lynn Johnston elevates what a comic strip can do—in this case I feel like her greatest strength is constantly contrasting private thoughts to illuminate greater empathy towards everybody. A sample from page 99 when Michael is thinking in the first panel “I bet it’s neat being a grown-up” and then in the second panel “They can do what they want, an’ go where they want… they’re free!” before the scene opens into the third panel where Ellie and John’s silhouettes are now colored in with stressed expressions and thought bubbles reading “Bills! Bills! Cook! Clean! Organize!” and Michael concluding in the last panel “Boy … sure must be nice.” Many of the collections are out of print so it’s worth rummaging around second hand bookstores or at online shops like ​SecondSale​ or ​AbeBooks​. I love this copy I found of her second collection from ​Doug Miller Books​ complete with a December 25, 1982 inscription in cursive blue pen reading “Dearest Dad, Love + Best Wishes, Janice and Phil.”

7. ​Letters To His Daughter​ by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Maria Popova has read more ‘letters’ and ‘diaries’ than anyone I know. Perhaps more than anyone—period. (She’s talks about diaries a bit in her ​wonderful conversation with Krista Tippett​ from 2015.) Check out her posts on The Marginalian featuring the letters of ​Mary Wollstonecraft​, ​Bruce Lee​, and ​W.E.B. Dubois​. Since the only diaries I’ve ever read are from ​Anne Frank​ and ​Adrian Mole, Age 13 ¾​, I decided I needed to go a bit deeper. First I came across this wonderful ​'Letter To His 11-Year-Old Daughter In Camp'​ by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and then I went ahead and ordered the whole book! It’s out of print so I ordered a used copy online. It’s stamped “Chesterfield-Marlboro Technical Education Center Library” and I can see from the borrower card at the back that it was signed out by Barbara Brewer on March 1, 1972, Joyce Miles on March 31, 1983, and seven times in between. Written mostly to his then 17-19 year old daughter Frances—who he calls “Pie,” Darlin’,” “Darling,” “Dearest,” “Scottina,” and “Scottie”—while she was at Vassar, all the way up till he died of a heart attack at age 44 just weeks before she graduated. In the flap copy the publishers say Fitzgerald was “trying to maintain his integrity and hope as a writer to be both father and mother, mainly by long distance, to his only child.” Writing from MGM Studios in Hollywood on November 25, 1938 he writes “I never blame failure—there are too many complicated situations in life—but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.” There’s a wonderfully erudite 1930s father-daughter tone throughout like when he writes “Your letter was a masterpiece of polite evasion” or cautions her about working too hard at the school play: “Amateur work is fun but the price for it is just simply tremendous. In the end you get ‘Thank you’ and that’s all.” But the best letter in the lot might be from his daughter! She writes the 'Introduction' and begins by saying “In my next incarnation, I may not choose again to be the daughter of a Famous Author. The pay is good, and there are fringe benefits, but the working conditions are too hazardous. People who live entirely by the fertility of their imaginations are fascinating, brilliant, and often charming, but they should be sat next to at dinner parties, not lived with.” She drops melancholic-twinged observations. “Good writers are essentially muckrackers, exposing the scandalous condition of the human soul.” And “I was an imaginary daughter, as fictional as one of his early heroines.” But eventually, generously, concluding: “Listen carefully to my father, now. Because what he offers is good advice, and I’m sure if he hadn’t been my own father that I loved and ‘hated’ simultaneously, I would have profited by it and be the best educated, most attractive, most successful, most faultless woman on earth today.—Scottie Lanahan” She sounds pretty faultless to me! Published in 1963 with Scottie’s intro added in 1965. A wonderful peek into a fascinating private relationship.

8. There is no 8! Just our regular loot bag of links. Surgeon General ​Vivek Murthy​ calls for ​health warnings on social media​. I really like this simple but powerful Icelandic ​anti-drunk driving ad​. Who's going to ​start this dating site​? John Green is figuring out ​what to share online​ after 20 years of self-promotion. A cerebral, vulnerable, slightly navel-gazey but genuinely fascinating ​chat​ between Amy Poehler and Dax Shepard. Anti-aging obsessive Bryan Johnson is ​selling snake oil​. Brad Stuhlberg wants us to invest in ​relationships and community​. And Tomas Peuyo issues a ​state of AI update​ that asks, "What would you do if you had 8 years left to live?"

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Interested in more of my reviews? Read my monthly book clubs or visit my Goodreads page.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - May 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

It's hot and drippy in Toronto and I've been thinking again about what it means to live intentionally and at a more human pace. I just wrote a new post ​about escaping the algorithm​ and revisited the wonderful 'Team Human' by Douglas Rushkoff as you'll see in the reviews below.

I also spent time this month with wonderful souls in new places. One goal we've had for 3 Books since we started six years ago was tapping into street smarts—street wisdom!—from everyday people like ​bartenders​, ​variety store owners​, ​Uber drivers​, and ​nurses​.

In that spirit I just released a This American Life-ish conversation on ​'bullets, bruises, and babies'​ with three people I met driving around St. Louis and also spoke this week to a room of 6500 ICU and ER nurses in Denver. Stretched to the brink in a broken system I heard tales of heartbreak, overwork, and overwhelm on the front lines. It feels more important than ever we keep talking to each other—through books, in-person chats, and any rich veins of conversation we discover on our own journeys.

I hope this monthly book club—coming to you the last Saturday morning of the month for 90 months in a row now—can be a rich vein for you as it has been for me. Reply anytime to let me know what rich veins you're trusting and relying on in your own life these days.

And now—let's get to the books!

Neil

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1. ​Martyr!​ by Kaveh Akbar. See if the opening paragraph of this debut novel by Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar grabs you like it did for me: “Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do-over. Clarification. Lying on his mattress that smelled like piss and Febreze, Cyrus stared up at the room’s single light bulb, willing it to blink again, willing God to confirm that the bulb’s flicker had been a divine action and not just the old apartment’s trashy wiring.” The first third of the book flew by for me in a wonderfully told story of a wannabe-writer in Indianapolis whose mom died in a senseless military-trial-gone-wrong type of plane explosion over the Persian Gulf and whose dad skirted by in America killing chickens on a factory farm. What happens after the first third? The book got … heavy. Akbar started weaving in all kinds of chapters from new perspectives: Cyrus’s mom’s lesbian encounters in the 80s, dream sequences with Rumi, and little bits of Cyrus’s novel-in-progress throughout. Still, I recommend this book for the sentences. So many glorious sentences. Akbar clearly chipped away at it for a long time as it has a Steve Toltz 'A Fraction of the Whole' (​2/2023​) style of wordy acrobatics. And, I will add without giving anything away, the book does 'pay off' nicely in the end.

2. ​Team Human​ by Douglas Rushkoff. I’m in a Douglas Rushkoff mood lately. I just ​wrote about him​ in a new blog post and revisited our conversation in ​Chapter 83 of 3 Books​ before pulling his wonderful 2019 manifesto ‘Team Human’ off my shelf. This book has the force of a train. A fiery, breathless, culture-shifting manifesto told in 100 tight, short essays, which I learned he modeled after the wonderful ‘Finite and Infinite Games’ (​8/2022​). It all ultimately adds up to a takedown of “the antihuman agenda embedded in our technology, our markets, and our major cultural institutions" and, for me, is a reminder to "find the others" and seek out deep human connection in the face of an increasingly anti-human world. We need Douglas’s voice right now. Check out his podcast ​Team Human​, his eponymous ​Substack​ and, of course, this wonderful book. Highly recommended.

3. ​Figuring​ by Maria Popova. “How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?” That’s a question that comes up early in this book and it sort of umbrellas over everything Maria Popova puts out—from this book to her live sciencey-poetry ​Universe in Verse events​ to her wonderfully 18-year-running, flowering-in-all-directions site ​The Marginalian​ (formerly called Brainpickings). In this book she zooms up a level and tells a fascinating history of arts and science told through deeply engaging and endlessly braided tales of the artists and scientists themselves. They’re not linear stories, though, because as she writes: “Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of ‘biography’ but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams.” So we get many-sided diagrams of figures like Johannes Kepler, Maria Mitchell, Rachel Carson, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, told with an entrancing spell of Maria’s particular brand of poetic narrative with endless snips and clips of letters, speeches, and writings weaved in. I love the posture of this book. It's like Maria herself: fiercely intelligent, deeply humanist, very… macro-orthogonal. Maria has often called literature “the original Internet” and her ability to dive deeper and wider than anyone else is on full display here. The book gave me wonder, perspective and, like everything Maria, a great deal of heart.

4. ​Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America​ by Ted Floyd. I have a lot of field guides “to the birds.” My favorites are my hyper-regional 'Birds of Ontario' (​6/2020​) and the completist masterpiece 'Sibley Birds East' (​3/2021​). But I have a lot of others: guides for places I want to visit ('A Guide to the Birds of India, Pakistan, and Nepal'), guides I’ve received as gifts, and even a wonderfully water-stained copy of Roger Peterson's ‘​A Field Guide To The Birds​’ which ​Leslie’s grandmother​ left me. (Side note: I recently learned Peterson is credited with starting “field identification,” like as a thing, with the original 1934 ‘A Field Guide To the Birds.’) If you’re new to birding, you need a field guide. If you’re new to field guides, it’s easy to take ​J. Drew Lanham’s​ advice and grab one at a second hand shop. The birds don’t change—​even if their names may soon​! So what is it about this field guide that I love? Photos! That's it. This one has photos. Every single other field guide I have has drawings or paintings, but this has over 2000 photos of all 730 North American species! A must-add to the field guide collection.

5. ​It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health​ by Robie H. Harris and illustrated by Michael Emberley. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick! Over to Leslie: “What I would give for a landline in the kitchen and cable TV in the living room over this technologically-charged-matrix our kids are growing up in!! One area we're trying hardest to protect our kids from an ‘internet education’ is sexual education. I remember learning so much about how my body, hormones, emotions, and relationships were changing from books my Mom got me and so I’m trying to do the same for our kids. This book is geared to children 10 and up and gives details about both male and female puberty, how to understand strong feelings and sexual desires, why it’s important to talk to your doctor about sexually transmitted diseases, laws around abortion and the importance about talking about sexual abuse. It even dives into how to get information AND stay safe on the internet. If you’re thinking these topics feel too advanced to discuss with your 10-year-old, as someone who teaches health to elementary school students, I’m here to tell you they’re not. My best advice is to start the sex conversations early and just keep them short and sweet. Many tiny honest questions grow into bigger conversations and help keep the doors open. From the same authors, there is ‘​It’s Not The Stork​’ (for 4 and up) and ‘​It's So Amazing​’ (for 7 and up). If you need inspiration on what to talk about when, check out this ​resource​. If we wait until the teen years it’ll be harder and more awkward for everyone and our kids will likely look somewhere else like (ugh) unsafe corners of the internet. So, if you have a 10 to 14-year-old and want to dive into giving a sex education at home, reading this together is a great place to start.”

6. ‘​What A Major Solar Storm Could Do To Our Planet​’ by Kathryn Schulz. A few weeks ago a friend of mine who lives in suburban Ontario sent our grouptext pictures of the Northern Lights…from his backyard. He’d never seen them from his place before but it was the same day as that news report surfaced warning people of a “solar storm.” What’s a solar storm? Exactly! What is a solar storm? I had no idea till I waded into this epic 8200-word New Yorker feature from Kathryn Schulz which helps explain. Basically, five years ago FEMA made a list of possible disasters and found that only two could simultaneously affect the entire nation. One is pandemics (they nailed that one!) and the other is a severe solar storm. Schulz reminds us that “the sun is an enormous thermonuclear bomb that has been exploding continuously for four and a half billion years” and whose inner workings we’re only figuring out now. She tells a compelling history of notable solar storms throughout history (all before our now-susceptible power and satellite grids were in place) through the profile of the “space-weather forecaster” Ken Tegnell. A great primer on an issue that feels soon-to-be-frequently-discussed.

7. ​Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads​ by Gary Greenberg and Jeannie Hayden. Before we had kids Leslie read a pile of parenting books. Me, I read … just this one. Somebody passed it along and the opening spread made me laugh. (Click the pic ​on this page​ to see it.) On the left: “What Your Newborn Won’t Look Like,” with a drawing of a cuddly, giggling 3-month old baby and, on the right, “What Your Newborn Will Look Like,” with a dark, crying newborn with labels like “cone-shaped head from squeezing through the womb,” “lanugo—fuzzy hair on face, back, and shoulders. This will eventually disappear,” and “skinny, structurally unsound legs.” I have bought so many copies of this book and passed it along to any dad-to-be. It’s so eminently readable and has a lot of tidbits and advice I used for months and years after. The book divides up the the first year of baby and 0-3 months includes topics like “Coping with Crying,” which explains how to tell between six different types of cries, “Wrestling The Breast Pump,” and “A Guy’s Guide to Strollers.” By the time you get to 10-12 months there are advanced topics like “Babies and Restaurants,” “Advanced Changing” and, my favorite, “The Decoy Drawer.” Greenberg writes: “Somehow the baby senses the power your electronic gear possesses and will take every opportunity to seize and/or destroy them. You decide to buy the baby colorful plastic versions of their own but, of course, the baby immediately throws aside the imposters and goes back to the genuine articles. That’s why you need to create a decoy drawer full of old phones, remotes, wallets, keys, and credit cards. The drawer should be at a good baby height and all items need to be real but non-functioning. That way when baby opens the drawer they think they found the mother lode.” Surprisingly rich with a light and funny tone throughout.

8. ​City Parks: A stroll around the world’s most beautiful public spaces​ by Christopher Beanland. Have you heard of ‘​The Crane Index​’? It’s a construction industry-produced metric to track the number of active cranes in 14 major cities across North America. Guess what city is number one and has been for years? My hometown! Toronto’s skyline is ​currently dotted with 221 operating cranes​. To put that in perspective numbers 2, 3, and 4 on the list are LA with 50, Seattle with 38, and Calgary with 20. “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” sang Joni Mitchell in ‘​Big Yellow Taxi​,’ and sometimes walking around Toronto these days you can almost feel the grass screaming. It was in that spirit I picked up this gorgeous visual escape into the greatest, grandest, grassiest city parks around the world. Organized by continent, the book gives lush 2-4 page spreads of each park along with a quick view of each from strong voiced globe-trotting park lover Christopher Beanland. When I first cracked open the book I checked my home country for credibility. There are precisely two Canadian parks in the book: Stanley Park in Vancouver and Mount Royal in Montreal. Biggies! Not a single park from Toronto but maybe that’s just how high the bar is here. ​Central Park​ in New York, ​Millennium Park​ in Chicago, ​Griffith Park​ in LA, that’s the scope of things. Here’s a snip of Beanland writing about ​Peace Memorial Park​ in Hiroshima, Japan, one of the few in the book I’ve actually visited: “Cemeteries are the most obvious examples of parks dedicated to death, but many memorial and peace parks dot the world too. Hiroshima’s brings together a collection of formal landscapes and tranquil gardens to memorialize that which was the opposite of both of those things: horror and slaughter on a previously unimaginable scale. But the language is telling: this is a Peace Park where the catastrophe of the atomic explosion of 1945 is seen as a warning to future generations, that the way and weapons of mass destruction must be avoided. Contains modernism museums and sculptures surrounded by lawns and trees. A mound at the centre contains the ashes of tens of thousands, peace bells toll to remind us, and the miraculously surviving A-Bomb Dome stands as a kind of monument to a human spirit that could not be crushed.” A wonderful coffee-table book to zoom us out of concrete jungles.

9. There is no 9! Just a little loot bag of links. Adam Grant reports on a study showing ​'banning smartphones in schools is good for learning and well-being.'​ We have to keep the pressure on to pull back from the tipping point. I didn't realize US birth rates are at the ​lowest level ever recorded​. I've been thinking on a parenting blog post Book Clubber Debbie S sent me called '​Pirates and Kings​' and enjoyed escaping this month listening to '​Living Proof​' by The War on Drugs and watching Jerry Seinfeld's funny and wise ​commencement speech to Duke University grads​.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - April 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Happy April!

The world is tilting away from social media. Can you feel it? It feels good. It feels so good.

Let’s get to the books!

Neil

PS. If you’re new to book club, sign up right here.

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1. ​The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness​ by Jonathan Haidt. Do you remember when nobody had cell phones? You’d spend half an hour at dinner trying to ​remember the name of that guy​ from that movie. You had to actually whistle at the corner of the street to get a ride home. And, my favorite, you just never knew where anyone was—pretty much ever. Pre-tracking, pre-surveilling, pre-obsessing-over-your-kids-whereabouts. Then twang! Culture snapped backwards. Partly because of the well-catalogued rise in the 1980s of 24/7 news and fear-based child abduction stories to hook us to the screens. Ensuing protectionism was accelerated by smartphones, then a pandemic, and now: we got issues. Higher than ever ​anxiety​, higher than ever ​depression​, higher than ever ​loneliness​. If we’re not careful we’ll end up like ​that scene in WALL-E​, riding our fat ships, sipping soylent, while being endlessly titillated by ​total entertainment forever​. But once in a while, once in a moment, a culture-defining book shows up at a culture-defining time to pull us back from the brink. To pull us back from fully hard-wiring ourselves into the matrix. That book is the wonderful ‘The Anxious Generation’ by NYU professor and brilliant thinker Jonathan Haidt (pronounced "height"). Yes, I said as I read this book, yes, yes, yes, yes. This is it! A deeply clear, deeply researched, deeply, dare I say, obvious clarion call for no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, entirely-phone-free schools, and a callback to open play for our kids instead of programmed safe-robot childhoods. (Jon even does a three-page photo spread on the value of ​old, dangerous playground equipment​. His rant on rusty merry-go-rounds was speaking my ​looooooove language​.) I love this book. I think you should buy it. By the dozen! By the skid! I am writing right now at my local coffee shop with the book sitting beside me and so far three people have come up asking me about the book. It’s hitting the zeitgeist hard—bang!—right when we need it most. Two people have just flipped through the book reading some of my highlights and I’d love to invite you to do the same. Here is ​part one of my highlights​. Here is ​part two​. I might post another. The whole book will be yellow soon! I just love Jon’s thoughts in here and, TBH, I think they could be stronger. I think a smartphone—like, access to the entire unfiltered world of anything and everything—should be age 16 not 14, so I’m arguing for eleventh grade not ninth grade as he is proposing. (Cal Newport ​agrees​, btw.) But let’s start somewhere! This book delivers many things including a much-needed slap to the face of tech companies who inadvertently, then advertently, began messing up our kids. Started innocently! On page 3 Jon writes: “… in 2008 my two-year-old son mastered the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone. Many parents were relieved to find that a smartphone or tablet could keep a child happily engaged and quiet for hours. Was this safe? Nobody knew, but because everyone else was doing it, everyone just assumed that it must be okay.” But then, looking back from years later: “Companies that strive to maximize ‘engagement’ by using psychological tricks to keep young people clicking were the worst offenders. They hooked children during vulnerable developmental stages, while their brains were rapidly rewiring in response to incoming stimulation. This included social media companies, which inflicted their greatest damage on girls, and video game companies and pornography sites, which sank their hooks deepest into boys.” Wait, did they know what they were doing? They did! On page 227 Sean Parker, first president of Facebook, says “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” and then goes on to share how he, Zuckerberg, Systrom et al “understood this consciously. And we did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our children’s brains.” On page 230 Jon shows us Zuckerberg’s market-based approach. He writes: “In August 2019, I had a video call with Mark Zuckerberg… I told him that when my children started middle school, they each said that most of the kids in their class (who were 10 or 11 at the start of sixth grade) had Instagram accounts. I asked Zuckerberg what he planned to do about that. He said, ‘But we don’t allow anyone under 13 to open an account.’ I told him that before our call I had created a fake account for a fictional 13-year-old girl and I encountered no attempt to verify my age claim. He said, ‘We’re working on that.’ While writing this chapter (in August 2023), I effortlessly created another fake account. There is still no age verification, even though age verification techniques have gotten much better in the last four years, nor is there any disincentive for preteens to lie about their age.” Go get ’em, Jon! Get ready to smash your router with a hammer and take your kids to the park after reading how our social interactions have, for millions of years, been embodied, synchronous, one-to-one or one-to-several, with a high bar for entry or exit. Whereas now we have slathered ourselves so deeply digital that social relationships have become disembodied, asynchronous, one-to-many, with a low bar for entry and exit. No wonder we are lonely! (Which is, no biggie, ​worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day​, according to this report from Surgeon General ​Vivek Murthy​.) Paraphrasing Esther Perel: ​'We got a thousand friends online but nobody to feed our cat.'​ Tightly written, endlessly punctuated with charts, with every chapter nicely summarized with a perfect bullet-point one-pager, this book is designed for max skimmability. You could honestly just flip past the 100 graphs and get the story. This is a rallying cry and anti-tech manifesto which offers new ways of living that look an awful lot like old ways of living. I am continuing to work with my school and public school board to ​get cell phones out of schools​. I am asking my city councillor for more ‘loose parts’ playgrounds instead of neon-red Safe-T-Shapes that no one likes. I am sending ​the wonderful work from the Let Grow movement to my public school board's Director of Education​ while also working hard with Leslie to give my kids longer and longer ranges so they can grow up untethered and antifragile. I have a long way to go but this book is nitro to get there. As Jon says in the very last three sentences of the book: “The Great Rewiring of Childhood, from play-based to phone-based, has been a catastrophic failure. It’s time to end the experiment. Let’s bring our children home.” Amen. Listen to my 2022 chat with Jon in his kitchen, over his wife’s delicious Korean food, ​right here​. Read my favorite pages from the book ​here​ and ​here​. Tell your neighbors about the book. Tell your friends! Tell your principals! Let’s keep the movement building. This book has been at the top of The New York Times bestseller list every single week since it came out a month ago and is currently #1 overall non-fiction book in the world on Amazon. WE HAVE LIFTOFF! Get a copy from your local indie bookstore, from the ​library​, from Jon's site ​directly​, from my ​non-commission-link-splitter​. Just get it! Highly recommended.

2. ​Goodbye, Galleria​ by Shari Kasman. I’ve been feeling mall-nostalgic lately. They’re bashing them down all around me. The people demand luxury condo skyscrapers! The $3 million dollar condo crowd simply will not rest till they get brand-name sinks on the 37th story! So malls are going. Fare thee well. Headed the way of the ​Passenger Pigeon​. Mall loss makes me sad. Not just for nostalgia! For community. Malls fostered and made deeply inclusive space for warmth, rest, and connection across society. The malls I grew up with were always strata-slicing not disparity-amplifying. They weren’t for rich people. They weren’t for poor people. They were for people. When we were little my sister and I would be led by our parents through ​Eaton’s​ or ​The Bay​, past the perfume-sprayers, out onto the embossed-brown-circles-on-brown-vinyl long ramp up and into a world of Fabriclands, Grand&Toys, and Coles Bookstores, before getting Manhattan Fries in a paper box with a tiny wooden fork or, sometimes, sitting on Santa’s lap. I miss the Rave Rave Rave in the Five Points Mall, the dark and long Oshawa Centre, and the forever-sandy floors at the Whitby Mall. We’d walk past old men with hairy shoulders in white tank tops on wooden benches outside the barber shop while moms with their hair in buns and open-buttoned winter jackets swerved strollers with big plastic bags hanging off the ends. This evocative photo journal by Shari Kasman gave me rushing wistfulness, blurry memories, and bittersweet nostalgia as she catalogues a two-year Halcyon Day period in the life of the Galleria Mall, which opened at the corner of Dufferin and Dupont in downtown Toronto in 1972. She writes: “Arcade games, rides, and candy dispensers that once lined the corridors are gone, and sheets of paper cover store-front windows formerly inhabited by fashionable mannequins. The food counter has vanished, and parts of the ceiling have been torn down, revealing the mall’s guts: wiring and ductwork. Even the iconic brown floor tiles have started to disappear.” There are shots of faded Zellers signs and we cruise past stores with names like Smoker’s Choice, Vic’s Fashion Jewelry, Health Food, and !nk Smart. The book is a twinge mocking but the tone wasn’t strong enough to negatively affect my read-feel. I know I’ll keep picking it up for the rest of my life whenever I suddenly feel like walking through a mall of my childhood. Thank you for this gift, Shari. And thank you to new downtown Toronto indie bookstore ​Flying Books​ for displaying it at the cash. Highly recommended.

3. ​Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life​ by Steve Martin. I walked over to visit my friend ​Michael Bungay-Stanier​ (​The Coaching Habit​) the other night and got there early. There was a ​Little Free Library​ across the street so I snapped open the magnet-attached door and found a pristine copy of this book inside. I have never seen a Jerry Seinfeld blurb on a book before and this one jumped out: “One of the best books about comedy and being a comedian ever written,” says the comedy king. So I picked it up! What is the book? A 17-year-old memoir by then-62-year-old Steve Martin, entirely written with a comic’s keen eye for economy. Short, tight sentences from The School of Cormac McCarthy. Steve tells a straight-faced, occasionally funny, always honest story of what might seem like a relatively benign life ordering magic tricks out of the back of a magazine and getting a job at the joke shop and, later, having panic attacks on weed and reconnecting with his family. But nothing sounds benign through Steve Martin’s lens. And what helps make the book special are endlessly weaved in morsels of from-my-later-years wisdom. He sounds a bit like the invisible narrator of ‘​The Wonder Years​’ and always comes across as humble and open-hearted. On page 27: “… my mother grew more and more submissive to my father in order to avoid his temper. Timid and secretive, she whispered her thoughts to me with the caveat ‘Now, don’t tell anyone I said that,’ filling me with a belief, which took years to correct, that it was dangerous to express one’s true opinion.” He shares his values. On page 34, after getting the job at the joke shop: “I harbored a secret sense of superiority over my teenage peers who had suntans, because I knew it meant they weren’t working.” He shares regrets. Page 46, after hitting the road as a struggling weird-magician playing to near-empty rooms: “When I moved out of the house at eighteen, I rarely called home to check up on my parents or tell them how I was doing. Why? The answer shocks me as I write it: I didn’t know I was supposed to.” He shares thoughts on comedy: “All entertainment is or is about to become old-fashioned,” and, “The more physically uncomfortable the audience, the bigger the laughs.” He talks about non-obvious ingredients to success: “Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.” And his later chapters on wrestling with fame are spectacular and must-read for anyone navigating dynamics of public attention. Tightly squeezed, highly concentrated, and double-spaced with lots of photos so the 204 pages feel breezy. Sometimes when you’re walking across town to your buddy’s place and completely mistime it you are lucky enough to discover a wonderful book. Highly recommended.

4. ​Five Little Indians​ by Michelle Good. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick, a book personally chosen and recommended by my wife. Over to you, Les! “Five Little Indians is a heartbreaking, hope-filled, empathy-expanding book about five survivors of Canada’s ​residential schools​. The story follows Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie, and Maisie’s lives as they are released from their detainment and struggle, with great determination, to find safety and some way forward. Their lives weave and interconnect through themes of resilience, the dire impacts of childhood trauma, healing, and perseverance. Since I closed the book I haven’t stopped thinking about each of them and how their stories represent so many other people whose childhoods were stolen from them, so many others who are struggling today because of how they were mistreated as children, and how incredibly damning childhood trauma is. This book should be required reading for every Canadian as we work to come to terms with the horrors that happened here in Canada and somehow use the lessons of the past to work toward protecting children around the world from violence, control, and mistreatment.”

5. ​Sideways Stories from Wayside School​ by Louis Sacher. I remember being 8 years old thinking I didn’t like books. I remember I used to! But suddenly I didn’t like reading anymore. My librarian at Sunset Heights Public School, Mrs. Farrell, had shocks of wild maroon and black hair and thick glasses, and she said “Neil, you just haven’t found the right book.” She guided me through the metallic wire bookshelves full of crinkly laminated paperbacks and picked up ‘Sideways Stories from Wayside School’ and handed it to me. The book blew my mind! Funny, absurd, transgressive, a bit deranged, it represented a way I was coming to see the world. I loved it right from the four sentences on the back cover: “There’d been a terrible mistake. Wayside School was supposed to be built with thirty classrooms all next to each other in a row. Instead, they build the classrooms one on top of each other … thirty stories tall! (The builder said he was very sorry.)” One important note: If you get the book I recommend the version illustrated by Julie Brinkloe. Each of the 30 chapters, for each of the 30 students on the 30th story of Wayside School, is opened with a cherubic, Fox Trotty-style cartoon from Julie that (to me) perfectly matches the tone of the book. The book was written in 1978 and the Brinkloe art was commissioned by Avon Books for this 1985 edition. Later editions make the art too abstract and surreal. So I say find Sideways Stories from your local used bookstore—or from online used seller Abe Books! Btw, I put Louis Sacher and this book in the Acknowledgements for ​The Book of Awesome​ in 2010 and was lucky enough to meet him in 2020 when we sat down for a ​3 Books interview​. (Turns out a lot of his absurdism was inspired by ‘Nine Stories’ by J.D. Salinger! (​6/2020​))

6. ​Alphabetical Diaries​ by Sheila Heti. This is not a book. It is a piece of modern art…wrapped in a book. Sheila Heti, author of ​Pure Colour​ and ​Motherhood​, has pulled off an incredible feat: She typed up 500,000 words from a decade’s worth of journals in Microsoft Excel, kept them all in their original ‘sentence form’ but ignored all paragraphs and dates, and then—poof, magic!—sorted all the sentences … alphabetically. “How much I enjoy pleasure. How much pleasure there is in just sitting around, writing, eating and reading. How nice it is to contemplate new things for a change, and how good it would be to do that every day, just as last night we contemplated the stars, another day it could be a tree; how many experiences are available to us in the nearest vicinity that we do not grasp hold of, let alone all those experiences at a further distance. How nice it is to have all these lovers, whatever happens with them. How nice it would be if one could actually rely on them. How random life is!” Um…wow, Sheila, you keep good diary. Flip this magic trick open to any page and you are met with a twisted sour-sweet combination of banality, wisdom, sultriness, and little confessions or ideas towards ever-so-slightly better living. Everything is mixed together and shared unflinchingly through the cloak provided by the alphabetization. Here are the book’s opening 3 sentences: “A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have many things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by its binding. A book like a shopping mart, all the selections.” There are 25 chapters in the book because she didn’t start a single sentence in 10 years with the letter X. Here’s how ‘chapter’ B starts: “Back at his place, he showed me pictures of his ex-girlfriend, and I talked to him about Lars. Back home, I just lay in my room alone and masturbated, content with my mediocrity. Bad metaphor, humans as machines.” Now while it may sound like putting together this book was a simple task it was clearly lonnnnnng-simmered—boiled down, down, down for years, years, years. By my count this book is around 50,000 words which means 90% of the diary was thoughtfully chiseled away to leave the glittering silhouettey-statue that remains. Brave, daring, vulnerable, tender, funny, sexy and always a little wonderfully askew, this is a deeply insightful, Instagram-fracturing diary of a novelist thoughtfully coming of age downtown in the 2010s. Highly recommended.

7. ​The Log from the Sea of Cortez​ by John Steinbeck. This is one of the most wonderful and wonderfully unusual books I have ever read. First up, Steinbeck! You know Johnny Steinbeck. Pulitzer-Prize winning author of 'East of Eden' (​03/2017​), '​Of Mice and Men​', and '​The Grapes of Wrath​'. But did you know that in 1940, after controversy erupted around The Grapes of Wrath (“Communist! Labor-sympathizer! Socialist!”), Johnny decided to say eff y’all and ship out. Literally. He and his pal Edward F. Ricketts (the basis of the character ‘Doc’ in ‘​Cannery Row​’ five years later) hailed a little sardine boat called the Western Flyer, together with its hilarious never-working-properly side boat, and then went on a slightly bizarre, world-connecting, animal-collecting, pattern-seeing, often meditative, and occasionally brain-burstingly philosophical 4000 mile voyage around the Baja peninsula (aka the big long pinky-finger down the left side of Mexico), into the Gulf of California which, I learned, is also known as The Sea of Cortez. The book is arranged in a series of vivid diary entries through March and April 1940. There are so many wonderful pull-quotes I want to share with you that I turned them into an ​entirely separate blog post and posted it right here​. Steinbeck’s thoughts on pelicans, sea lions, the military complex, the turning tides of time, teleology (which was our ​Word of the Chapter with Cal Newport​!), and much, much more. The book is coated in all kinds of intros, outros, and appendices, none of which I read. But the journal entries—wow, they take you right there. If you want to sail a boat around Baja eighty years ago, this is the book for you. Highly recommended.

8. ​Little House in the Big Woods​ by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I first came to this book via Gretchen Rubin, who called it one of her 3 most formative books way, way back in the ​Paleolithic era of the podcast​. I’ve since found it to be the perfect chapter book to read aloud with burgeoning brains. I just read it with my five-year-old who was enraptured throughout. It begins: “Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house of logs. The great, dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around the house, and beyond them were more trees. As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods. There were no houses. There were no roads. There were no people. There were only trees and the wild animals who had their homes among them.” Sounds like not much goes down! But ah, that’s where you’re wrong. Panther attacks and smoking fish in trees and playing catch with pig bladders—it all goes down in the very first volume of the nine-book “Little House” series which begins with this 1932 classic. Make sure you get the version illustrated by Garth Williams! We just made that mistake with the sequel ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ which we’re reading now. Had to exchange our tiny, fine-print edition for 18-point font version with good ol' Garth’s drawings. (Who, I just learned, did ‘Charlotte's Web’ (​2/2020​) and ‘Stuart Little,’ too!). Anyway, back to 'Little House in the Big Woods': A vivid, highly detailed, unforgettable photo tableau of life in Wisconsin in the 1800s. Highly recommended.

9. There is no 9! Just our regular loot bag of links. First up, I just released a long-form chat with Cal Newport and it’s one of my ​early experiments on YouTube​. (You can listen on ​Apple​ or ​Spotify​, if you prefer.) An interesting way to look at ‘2000 years of economic history ​in one chart​.’ 'Nature' writes a ​critical review of Jon Haidt's book​ and he ​responds on Twitter​. A few smart things Morgan Housel ​has read lately​. 10 hidden Mac features ​you didn’t know existed​. One more shoutout to check out the ​Let Grow movement​ and, of course, ​‘The Anxious Generation.’​ I am getting more into street art and street love and am enjoying the ​Toronto Sign Reimagination Unit​, the wandering exploits of Toronto-based street artist ​Lewis Mallard​ (who dresses up like a duck and quacks across the city), and the incredible street murals created by fellow bird aficionado ​Nick Sweetman​ (I mean, ​come on​!).

Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - March 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Are you finding any time to read these days?

If yes, kudos! You're a reader. You're ahead of the pack! If not, you came to the right place. You're already reading this. The cultural push against social media and cell phone addiction is growing into a fierce tidal wave. The solution to much of what ails us? Getting outside, hanging IRL with friends, and, of course, getting back into reading books.

I read 5 books a year, tops, before I started this book club. This is one of 8 habits I use to keep pushing against our endlessly-cajoling algorithmic overlords.

You help me read more.

I help you read more.

It's a simple trade.

Let's keep at it!

Neil

PS. If you have a friend who wants to read more they can join us right here.

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1. Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying The Birds In Your Own Backyard by Joan E. Strassmann. I went to St. Louis for the first time ever a couple weeks ago. I made sure to see the Eurasian Tree Sparrow (a St. Louis species!), the 630-foot-tall and 630-foot-wide Gateway Arch, and, of course, the famous Left Bank Books. Founded in 1969, it’s an incredible bookstore with the mission to ‘spark public conversation by curating an intelligent, relevant, culturally diverse selection of books.’ That they do! When you walk in there’s a giant Book Club Wall with an immaculate grid of front-facing ‘Current Reads' from a host of store-sponsored + local book clubs. They host a Gay Men’s Book Club, a Lesbian Book Club, and a Well-Read Black Girl Book Club, among many others. They have a wonderful Used / Rare Books basement with a (potentially used / definitely rare) POS system! And there is (of course) the loveable bookstore black puffy cat Orleans, who curls up in a basket under the front table. Oh! And no joke: they host over 300 free public events a year! Those are Books&Books-sized numbers. Since you are not allowed to leave a bookstore without buying a book, I wandered and browsed and asked for some uniquely local books. I ended up with ‘The Twenty-Seventh City’ by Jonathan Franzen (with the Gateway Arch on the cover!) as well as this autographed copy of a wonderful book by St. Louis author Joan Strassman, a professor at 1853-founded (!) St. Louis-based Washington University. What’s the thesis? “If you tie in the biological stories that go with the birds, they will be much more rewarding to watch.” Amen! She splits the book into chapters focusing on 'backyard birds' — Blue Jay, European Starling, Cooper's Hawk, etc. — and then goes wonderfully and meditatively deep on each one, taking us through important research that have helped us learn about their behavior (Cooper’s Hawks in BC have bigger feet than in the Midwest because in BC their diet is mostly caught in mid-air whereas in the Midwest it's more off-the-ground), showing how the birds fit into our culture (“Did blue as a color of law enforcement first come from Blue Jays?”), and then giving us tips to become better ‘slow birders’ for each species (like how to use feather color to guess the age of Starlings). A book to deepen the love of backyard birds and to perhaps help take J. Drew Lanham’s advice to us to wean ourselves off compulsive listing.
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​2. Wild About Books by Judy Sierra. This is one of the very best books I know to get a kid excited about reading. “It started in the summer of 2002, When Springfield librarian Molly McGrew, By mistake drove her bookmobile into the zoo.” What follows? The animals go wild, simply wild, for books, of course. “Giraffes wanted tall books and crickets craved small books, While geckos could only read stick-to-the-wall books. … She even found waterproof books for the otter, Who never went swimming without ‘Harry Potter.’” Marc Brown of ‘Arthur’ fame does the art and Judy channels her PhD in Folklore (!) into a Seussian-inspired passion for fast-paced rhymes in this delightfully energizing and reading-reaffirming romp through the wide world of books. I noticed online this book has sold over 500,000 copies. That's zillions in the contemporary kids book category! (My kids book sold 50,000.) 20 years later this book is still incredibly popular for good, good reason. Highly recommended.
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​3. Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport. Cal feels like a bit of a kindred spirit. He was editor of his campus comedy paper. I was editor of my campus comedy paper. He has no social media apps on his phone. I have no social media apps on my phone. He writes about deep work. I write about untouchable days. He makes books and podcasts. I make books and podcasts. Are we both banging the same drum? Perhaps merging identities? Maybe! So what is ‘slow productivity’? Cal said he first tested the phrase in a February 2022 episode of The Tim Ferriss Show and noticed it had strong resonance with the fractured-attention set. Basically, it boils down to three principles: 1) Do fewer things, 2) Work at a natural pace, 3) Obsess over quality. Sounds simple, right? Trite, even! But that’s when you raise your head and realize the world is conspiring against you doing any of these. I mean, capitalism (or perhaps what Cal coins 'pseudo productivity') tends to reward ... doing more things, working at an unnatural pace, and obsessing over quantity. This is a slim read and it’s full of lengthy deep dives on people like Emily Dickinson, Marie Curie, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, which will hopefully help charge you up to live a slowly productive life. I will add that while I’m not perfect at this I am completely into it and have been for a while. I don’t have any employees — no big team, no big office — and yet in the past 15 years I’ve put out 10+ books, 100+ podcasts, 500+ speeches, and have 4 newsletters, including the daily awesome thing I’ve written since 2008. What are tradeoffs? Lots! Small ones and big ones. On the smaller side: no social media apps, no video games, no Netflix, no ... uh, relaxing? At least it's something I've struggled with. And then, on the bigger side, at least in my experience, by not managing a team, I also, in some sense, trade impact. Scaling, growth, changing a billion lives — yeah, uh, not sure I'll get there. This book did that thing that great books do: It made me think. Helped me wonder and self-examine. Cal is swinging hard here. He's saying: "I've thought a lot about this. I'm idiosyncratic. Now lemme tell you all my ideas." I think with his growing profile as a New Yorker writer and the fact he's only 41 years old we are inching closer and closer to Peak Cal. I highly recommend his podcast Deep Questions and exploring the treasure trove of his bibliography — including long-ago written gems such as 'How To Be A High School Superstar.' Be sure to check out this wonderful book.
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​4. Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs. I first ‘met’ Jane Jacobs through her 2006 obituary. Now almost twenty years later I find myself increasingly drawn to her voice. In obits The Economist called Jane an “anatomiser of cities” and The New York Times said she was a “writer and thinker who brought penetrating eyes and ingenious insight to the sidewalk ballet…” She is perhaps most famous for helping thwart Robert Moses’ plans to build the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have carved up SoHo, Little Italy, and Chinatown, and then she followed that Finishing Move by moving to Toronto and … doing it again! Thwarting the Spadina Expressway which would have shredded our downtown. Jane The Double-Thwarter! When we sat down with Jeff Speck, author of ‘Walkable City’ (3/2020), we fell into a rabbit hole of Jane Jacobs quotes including one of my favorites: “By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” Well, I recently found a used copy of this book — written at age 88, one year before she died — and found it gripping. In Chapter 1 she writes that “the purpose of this book is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off ….” She speaks with giant scope and discusses cultures all hitting Dark Ages, including the Roman Empire which crumbled in the fifth century, the Islamic Empire of the eighth to fifteenth centuries, and ancient Chinese Empires that (I learned) ruled the seas 500 years ago — sending 400-foot long ships holding up to 28,000 (!) sailors to Africa decades before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. “Centuries before the British Royal Navy learned to combat scurvy with rations of lime juice on long sea voyages,” she writes, “the Chinese had solved that problem by supplying ships with ordinary dried beans, which were moistened as needed to make bean sprouts, a rich source of Vitamin C.” But then what? You guessed it: Dark age. A new political party comes in and halts voyages and dismantles shipyards. Skills are lost over a couple generations. She goes through that refrain again and again: how we can’t assume that what we have won’t slip away and how we need to actively strive to make things better. This book carries deep wisdom from your activist elder as you learn about the five key pillars of culture, and how they’re currently showing signs of decay. “Families Rigged To Fail,” “Credentialing Versus Educating,” “Science Abandoned,” “Dumbed-Down Taxes,” and “Self-Policing Subverted.” It’s dark territory, and occasionally too micro, but you can feel Jane striving, at the end of her life, to close things out with a positive finish. Clear, punchy, and with a delightful air of Marisa Tomei-on-the-witness-stand-in-‘My Cousin Vinny’ throughout. Highly recommended.
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​5. The One And Only Bob by Katherine Applegate. Here comes this month's Leslie's Pick! Over to you, Les: "'The One and Only Bob' has just as much emotion and humor as the first book in the series, 'The One and Only Ivan,' (8/2021) and as our 9 year old said, "I think it was a bit better because it had more adventure and less animal cruelty.” I personally preferred 'The One and Only Ivan' (bit more into rooting for a gorilla to escape captivity in a mall than rooting for a dog to find his long-lost sister in a hurricane) but this is still a wonderful book to read aloud with kids who are otherwise reading chapter books independently. There is such strong voice, subtleties that are powerful to pause and discuss, and some more mature themes, but not the even more mature ones like being an orphan, living through war, major bullying, racism, and mental health that I find riddle most chapter books for the 8-12 age group and (to me) seem more appropriate for 12-15 year olds. My favorite part of this book is that we are just both so excited to read it every night. After many nights of him preferring to read alone, I will gladly read aloud any book he wants for the time together, to have our bodies close to each other, have heart-forward discussions, and connect before bedtime. I recommend reading this with your school-age independent reader, too. Can’t wait to read 'The One and Only Ruby' next!"
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​6. The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel. Do you wish there was a giant plug we could yank out of the wall one day a week to shut everything down? Dmmmmmmmmm. Remote control buttons don’t do anything. Payment systems go offline. Screens all black. Maybe you hear birds chirping out your window a bit more. Sun on your skin. Look round at your family. Chat with the neighbors. Would it be that different from a few decades ago when essentially nothing opened Sundays? I grew up in the Toronto suburbs in the 1980s and it was agreed: Sunday was family day, rest day, church day, reflection day. “Gallantly, ceaselessly, quietly man must fight for inner liberty,” writes Abraham Heschel in this slim, 73-year-old interpretation and explanation of the Sabbath, the traditional Jewish day of rest from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. I like the idea. I say bring it back! “Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people.” Yes! The book is slim — 100 pages on the nose — but it’s got a thick, dense, unfurling feeling like some kind of deep-in-the-jungle fern. Heschel came to America in 1940, mastered English, and wrote this book 11 years later as a way to expand and introduce the Sabbath to a wider audience. Why? Simple: “The solution of mankind’s most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence from it.”
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​6. Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams At The Edge of Death Valley by Brent Underwood. I first met Brent Underwood about eight years ago when he was running a hostel in Austin, Texas. He had a strong marketing mind, sharpened from years of working with Ryan Holiday, but a calm, easy spirit — sitting in a swinging chair on a porch, pasting Polaroids on the wall, kind of daydreamy way of looking at the world. Maybe that’s why four years ago he mortgaged everything he had to suddenly … uh, buy a ghost town? In the middle of nowhere? And then proceed to get trapped there at the start of the pandemic?? And then become a big-name YouTube star? Didn’t see that coming! But I love what it’s done for Brent and the now millions of people who have followed his pilgrimage and steep personal growth curve to find and connect his place in the world with all that’s come before. I guess hanging out 900 feet below ground — where he, no joke, recorded the audio book to this memoir — will have that effect on a person. The ideas in here aren’t revolutionary but they are earnest and speak to a generation trying to find their way. Pairing personal risk, hard lessons, and online stardom may be the story of our time. A great book for millennials and Gen Zs searching, seeking, trying to find their way. In other words: lots of us! Read the Preface of the book right here.
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​7. The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe and Salva Rubio. This is a true and inspiring read-it-in-an-hour graphic-novel distillation of the 433-page book of the same name. Dita Kraus is the 94-year-old Holocaust survivor who, as a young girl, remarkably functioned as a stealthy underground librarian in a Nazi death camp. What do you grasp at, reach for, cling to, when someone is trying to … exterminate your culture? A horrifying question. One answer gently offered here is … books. Stories. To quietly and compassionately (and desperately) pass around ideas and wisdom, despite the circumstances, in spite of the circumstances. This book rings hard today. I was thinking about what little I truly know or understand about what’s happening in the Middle East right now. In the past five months over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed. 30,000!? (Source) The UNICEF executive director just said “We haven’t seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world.” (Source) Horrifying to contemplate, even despite the circumstances that led to these atrocities. How many stories are being lost? How many will never be told? The authors and illustrators have done a wonderful job balancing many interlacing storylines while being extremely compassionate, careful, and sensitive with the complex material. Highly recommended.
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​9. There is no 9! Just an update. I've been working with the TDSB for years on cell phone policies. TDSB is the Toronto District School Board, the largest school board in Canada and the fourth largest school board in North America with 238,000 students. After speaking with them in 2018 I recommended a Zones, Modeling, and Fasting idea to address the growing pervasiveness of problematic cell phone use. I was then asked by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) to speak to the country on national TV about what I considered 'the biggest problem facing Canadians.' What did I talk about it? You guessed it: Cell phone addiction. Then I was invited back to speak to all Principals and Vice-Principals again last summer and before I spoke I was told "We aren't contemplating a policy change at this time." It's hard to think about policy changes at that level! There are so many variables and so much pushback and policing. But, I'm lucky, I was ... external. So I went onstage and ... called for policy change! I asked Principals and Vice-Principals, for the sake of their students (and my kids who go to TDSB!) to ban cell phones from schools. Many Principals did it on their own in the absence of a higher-level policy. Grassroots! Bottoms up! Then I began working with the Chair and Director on a blanket policy for the board. We were largely drawing on the excellent work by Jon Haidt who has been publishing incredible stuff on his After Babel Substack for the past couple years. (Here's me hanging out in Jon's kitchen talking about this and formative books.) Now, the latest is I'm reading Jon's brand new ‘The Anxious Generation’ which just came out Tuesday (and is #4 overall on all of Amazon ... though I got my copy from my local indie Type Books) and the TDSB has just announced a $4.5 billion lawsuit against Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat. The tide is shifting! We know cell phones are dangerous. Let's raise the social media age to 16! Let's ban cell phones from classrooms! Let's avoid smartphones before high schools! Brains only get one change to develop. Let's keep pushing ...

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - February 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Hope you’ve had a great February.

I got so many generous replies to my ​recent blog post on death​. Thank you for your love, poems, thoughts.

On the podcast, I feel like we’re in a ​wonderful flow​. Today's the full moon — this minute actually, look up! — so I'll send a letter about it to those of you on my ​3 Books email list​ after lunch with details. Upcoming guests include Celine Song, Susan Orlean, Jonathan Franzen, Maria Popova. As always, if you have a guest suggestion, just give me a shout at ​1-833-READ-A-LOT​. (Yes, this is my phone number.)

And now, as we’ve done every month since October 2016, here is every single book I read this month along with my honest review. Few were tough to write this month. I don't love trashing Harry Potter. But, as always, nobody can buy their way onto my book club and nobody can buy their way off.

Know someone who'd like to join our reading or hopeful-to-read-more tribe? Just forward them this email. Howdy, newcomer! Great to be with you and you ​can sign up right here​.

Now let’s hit the books…

Neil

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1. ​The Trial​ by Franz Kafka. “No one’s got Kafka these days,” Patrick told me recently, petting his cat behind the counter at the underground used bookstore mecca ​Seekers​. “Can’t keep him in stock. Nobody can. Hits too close to home these days.” Could that be true? No used bookstore in all of Toronto has anything written by the 1883-born Franz Kafka? This is a guy who instructed his buddy Max to burn all his unpublished books after he died. Max, sharp dude, did the opposite. I went hunting in a few used bookstores – gotta buy Kafka used, I figured! – but eventually caved in and went online to ​AbeBooks​ to find the 1954 edition of the 1925 publication of the 1914 written book that sounds like a 100-year-in-the-future prophecy of our ​low-trust​ ​surveillance state​. First sentence sets the scene: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K. for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Why? “We are not authorized to tell you that,” say the cops, who are mercilessly beaten in a closet later on. This is a slowly-closing-in-on-all-sides tale of foreboding. Can you imagine being arrested by a remote, inaccessible authority, without your crime being revealed to you? Maybe doesn't seem as farfetched as it should! There's a reason ​kafkaesque​ became a word, after all. Max stitched the chapters together from Franz’s handwritten scraps so chapters do feel occasionally ... stitched together. But it does all add up to a highly engrossing, wonderfully paced, increasingly bleak book that gave me skin-crawling anxiety. Yet there is art in the bleakness! Reflection and thundering thematic resonance across space and time. Highly recommended.

2. ​150 Bookstores You Need to Visit Before You Die​ by Elizabeth Stamp. Lots to like about this book! Lots to not like, too. But let’s start with the positive: It's a beautiful, colorful collection of some of the world’s most stunning bookstores, paired with a 200-ish word writeup mentioning what makes each unique – from the “Winnie Mandela mural” (​Cheche Books​, Nairobi, Kenya), Pacific Northwest section (​Arundel Books​, Seattle, Washington), or unique, store-made stationary (​Podpisnie Izdaniya​, St. Petersburg, Russia). Cliffside bookstores! Main Street Mississippi bookstores! Glass boxes in the middle of Chinese jungle bookstores! Everything’s here! Or: so it seems. Then you look closer. And realize it's not. So that’s my quibble. The book just isn’t in any way … authoritative. Like here in Toronto, for instance. We’ve got one bookstore featured from the city. Great! But, no offense to ​Queen Books​, they picked the wrong one. ​Type Books​, which Queen Books is clearly based on, is not featured – but Type is superior. More history, more events, more weird genres (“Plotless Fiction” becoming so culty they’ve ​stamped it on T-shirts now​.) Or what about the four-story baby-blue behemoth ​BMV​? Way more of a standout on the Toronto bookstore scene, with its entirely-graphic-novel attic, basement full of vintage 70s pinup mags, and lock-and-key rare book glass shelves featuring $700 dictionaries. And no ​Monkey’s Paw​? Come on. There’s a reason Monkey’s Paw is ​featured in Atlas Obscura​. The place sells “Old and Unusual Printed Matter” and has the world’s only Biblio-Mat – an ​incredible book vending machine​! How do you skip any of those for newbie Queen Books? Or ​Parnassus Books​ in Nashville, or ​The Painted Porch​ in Bastrop, or ​Nowhere Bookshop​ in San Antonio? How do you miss them? By… uh, not visiting. Yes, upon closer inspection, the book is written by Elizabeth Stamp, about whom we get 0 biographical info. Is she a bookseller? Book tourist? Book anything? Where does ... she live? Nobody knows! (I googled her and the answer is none of the above.) Stamp just picked, according to the intro, “bookstores I’d want to visit.” Ohhhhh. Want to visit. That’s why the Photo Credits at the back have a slew of iStockPhotos. Booooooooo! I give credit to Belgium-based Lannoo Publishing. They’ve figured something out. I know this book will look pretty on coffee tables but we need someone to fly around the world for a few years to put together something better. Who’s up for the job?

3. ​Great Plains​ by Ian Frazier. On the inside flap of this journalistic masterpiece are two faded-orange maps. The one on the left shows the “Great Plains c. 1850” with Coronado’s 1541 trail, Lewis and Clark’s 1804-1806 trail, and Parkman’s 1846 trail curling through Blackfeet, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Comanche country. The one on the right shows the “Great Plains Today”, with the same geography now labeled top-to-bottom with Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. And, instead of Lewis and Clark, we get “Frazier’s Route”, with the New Yorker humorist’s black-lined 25,000-mile routemap circling these states top to bottom, around and through, as he drove through them in the 80s. ​Booktuber Ariel Bissett​ once told us that books are places – taking you somewhere you’ve never been and leaving you with a satisfying sense of visiting afterwards. In this book, a local helps you through barbed wire fences, a radio announcer comes on and says “… if there’s anything you don’t want blown away, you better tie it down”, laundromat signs scream “Do Not Wash Rig Clothes Here”, and “a spider as big as a hand crosses the pavement.” Part travelogue, part David Sedaris diary (​3/2022​), this is a wondrous, mind-everywhere book that feels like a long road trip. You’ll feel the sun, you’ll feel the wind, and you’ll never want to run out of gas. Highly recommended.

4. ​The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History​ by Jonathan Franzen. Between his monumental 2001 National Book Award-winning '​The Corrections​' and his monumental 2010 Oprah-and-Obama-praising '​Freedom​', Jonathan Franzen quietly released a slim sub-200-page memoir told in six essays. I recommend this for anybody who’s gorged on Franzen’s fiction and wonders about the inner life that’s conjuring up his magic shows. Ultimately, the life story is kind of, you know, normal. Geeky kid grows up in St. Louis suburbs, with a couple older brothers, plays pranks in school with his buddies, falls in love with birds. But the magic here is in his frankness, bluntness, honesty, and poetic, dark asides, like this paragraph about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer: “Fabulous to be a defense contractor, shitty to be a reservist, excellent to have tenure at Princeton, grueling to be an adjunct at Queens College; outstanding to manage a pension fund, lousy to rely on one; better than ever to be bestselling, harder than ever to be mid-list; phenomenal to win a Texas Hold ‘Em tournament, a drag to be a video-poker addict.” Franzen’s keen eye turned inwards for the superfans.

5. ​Prince Caspian​ by C.S. Lewis. According to the Chronicles of Narnia '​Reading Order​’, this is the second book to read in the 7-book Narnia series. Start with ‘The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe’! (​3/2018​) First one, big one! That book came out in 1950, takes place in 1940 (Earth time), and 1000 (Narnia time). This book, ‘Prince Caspian’, came out in 1951, takes place in 1941 (Earth time), and 2303 (Narnia time). Bit of a bummer for the four Pevensie siblings to discover when they get back to Narnia the kingdom they once ruled (after defeating the White Witch in book one) has fallen into disarray. Animals hiding! Land dark! But, luckily, Prince Caspian escapes his evil stepfather, finds the talking animals, and then they all team up with the Pevensies to stage an epic battle to rule the kingdom. Not as good as the first book, I have to say. Maybe it only felt paint-by-numbers to me because it was the paint for so many fantasy series to follow. But I came away missing the rolling, swelling, poetic writing in ‘The Hobbit’, and ultimately this book helped me steel myself to finally tackle ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ Are you on Team CS or Team JRR? Kevin the Bookseller sold us hard on Lord of the Rings in that wild bouncing-around-a-bookstore chat we had back in ​Chapter 44​. I do feel my allegiances growing to Team JRR. One series to rule them all, one series to find them...

6. ​Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future​ by Dale Jamieson. You got a great brain. Me too, if I do say so myself. We all own one of these extremely handy objects that are good at so many things! Unfortunately, solving climate change just isn’t one of them. “Evolution built us to respond to rapid movements of middle-sized objects,” writes Dale Jamieson, “not to the slow buildup of insensible gasses in the atmosphere.” Indeed. Climate change was international news 75 years ago! There was momentum. Summits! Pledges! Signatures from heads of state saying yes, yes, yes, we’ll reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. What’s happened since? The … exact opposite. The earth is heating up fast. Rising sea levels are soaking coastal cities. Climate migration is spiking. Weather patterns are in disarray. We didn’t even get snow this winter in Toronto! Why? Well, “climate change poses the world’s largest collective action problem. Each of us acting on our own desires contributes to an outcome we neither desire nor intend.” This is a necessary, detailed, devastating story of our increased awareness of human-created climate change, our failed attempts to do anything about it, and what happens next. It’s not simple! After opening with “The Nature of the Problem” and “Obstacles to Action” (which are worth the buy alone, just for the clear history presented that these days gets washed away in the slipstream of screaming on socials) the book gets into headier topics of morality and philosophy that try and pull apart the problem in the many ways we think about it. One memorable section shows the increasing abstraction that climate change plays on our minds from, you know, Jack stealing Jill’s bicycle is wrong, all the way up to “Acting independently, Jack and a large number of unacquainted people set in motion a chain of events that causes a large number of future people who will live in another part of the world from ever having bicycles.” Which is sort of what’s happening. Over 80% of global carbon emissions come from 10 countries. Who is it? That would be … us. Or people who, you know, drive, fly, buy stuff that comes from the other side of the world. Complexities of global economics and neverending disagreements on how to measure these things prevent the plastic bouncy ball bought from the dollar store and tossed in the birthday party loot bag from coming anywhere close to being properly priced. So what do we do? Jamieson closes with seven priorities: “integrate adaptation with development” (tie together the math on climate change with our goals on reducing poverty), “protect, encourage, and increase terrestrial carbon sinks” (stop cutting down rainforests and plant new ones), “full-cost energy accounting” (bouncy balls at dollar stores costing more than a buck), “raising the price of emitting greenhouse gasses” (black billowing smoke into the sky isn’t free), “force technology adoption” (like ditching coal-burning plants in favor of newer tech), and then making “substantial increases in research”, and, finally, to “plan for the Anthropocene.” We’re there, he’s saying, so let’s work on that. This is the kind of book most people will run away from. Or think the understandable “I’m just one person and I can’t possibly change things.” But we can take small acts: biking instead of driving, avoiding disposable junk, carbon offsetting flights. And, you know, at minimum, for the future of our species, being informed about what’s happened, what’s happening, and what we can help happen. Jamieson spent 25 years on this book – “I began writing when I turned 40 and handed in the manuscript when I turned 65” – and the detail, of thoughts, ideas, and research shows. It’s not an easy read. I alternated chapters on audio. (David Sedaris gave us that tip for ‘hard books’ back in ​Chapter 18​.) But it’s a necessary read. Sure, I feel depressed, but in a much stronger, much more aware place, to at least understand what’s happening, why it happened, and then guide myself, and ideally my politicians, to keep the pressure on making change and, finally, ultimately, adapting. Highly recommended.

7. ​Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows​ (Book 7) by J. K. Rowling. Like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6) (​8/2023​), I read this right when it came out. Like ten minutes after it came out. I waited in line at Chapters Rideau in Ottawa, Canada for midnight copies and was lying in bed at age 31 till the wee hours excitedly thinking “I am one of the first people in the world to be here right now!” That was 2007. But my 17-years-later self kind of withered from the few hundred extra pages of aimless Horcrux hunting in this final installment. The deep, long, somewhat pointless sidebar into Dumbledore’s sister and mom. I don’t mean to be snide. I love Harry Potter! And, I should say, that’s not all that happens. There is also the senseless murder of a major character every 50 pages. Yes, we do get the epic 100-page fight scene of Harry and Lord V circling each other in the Hogwarts atrium dispensing plot reveals (“You touched the elder wand last!”, “No, you touched the elder wand last!”). And I will always love the book for what it is, what it was to me, what it will be to my kids I’m sure: A gateway drug to reading. A ticket to the world of “books as rock stars”. I mean, J. K. Rowling did a ​reading of Harry Potter in the Skydome​. 20,264 people (seriously) listening to an author? That’s great! That’s gold. But ultimately, I’m just sort of torn up about the revisiting. No reader steps through the same river twice, I suppose. I did enjoy watching characters like Neville in their slow-building arc and, you know, I cried half a dozen times on the pillow next to my son. You know the scenes. But I have mixed emotions. Partly surfacing, maybe, from also ​just watching the first Harry Potter movie​. Did we ever really feel sparks between Ron and Hermione? Did we really need that ‘19 Years Later’ chapter at the end? Ultimately, Book 7 wasn’t as good as Book 6, which wasn’t as good as Book 5, which wasn’t as good as Book 4, which wasn’t as good as Book 3. OK, it was better than the first couple. I’ll give it that. Azkaban, baby! Tentpole of the series! Thanks for the trip, J. K. It was a helluva ride and I’m sure I’ll be back with my next kid.

8. ​Begin Again: How We Got Here, and Where We Might Go – Our Human Story. So Far.​ by Oliver Jeffers. This isn’t a children’s book but a long visual essay that stirs a ​Sapiens​-like species history into a disaffected artist’s worldview with a spirited hopefulness for the future. What’s Jeffers's recipe for our post-“cogs in the machine”, ​Total Entertainment Forever​-type present? He says we get there “By slowing down. By creating better stories. Bigger ones where we all fit inside the same powerful plot. In which we think beyond our own lifetimes.” I’m not sure what children Harper Collins Children’s Books had in mind here with this massive, thick, thirty-dollar hardcover. Feels more geared to high school art students. It’s stunning to look at – evocative neon pinks and splashy purple watercolors with cavemen walking out of oceans and inventing rocket ships. But, ultimately, a one-and-done read that’s heavy on moralizing without adding much to the conversation. I’d skip this for Oliver’s earlier books like ‘​How to Catch a Star​’, ‘​Lost and Found​’, and ‘​The Way Back Home​’ and even, in this newer, more zooming-up-and-out political spirit, his 2017 “​Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth​.”

9. There is no 9! You hit our regular loot bag of links. First up, I was stunned by this New York Times piece on ​"A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men."​ I was brainstorming a ​'what if we got a million signatures on a petition to increase the social media age'​ ... but maybe that's not the right approach. What do you think? At least the UK is ​putting an end to phones in classrooms​ — Rishi Sunak nailed it with this launch video. Brené Brown shared ​a blog post​ with the first line 'My mom died on Christmas morning.' Jason Fried reminds us to '​never delegate your word​'. In an era of bots, we trust brains! Have you forgotten how trippy ​'Be Our Guest'​ is? Bryan Johnson was on the Rich Roll podcast and it kind of blew me away — ​here are my pop-out quotes​ to see if you're up for the 3-hour trip. Oh! And, for those who've read 'The Happiness Equation', I invented a follow-up to The Saturday Morning Test called ​The Sunday Night Suffix​. Finally! Remember it's the full moon so Chapter 133 is live right ... ​now​.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - January 2024

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,
​
How was your January?
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We’ve been desperate for snow in Toronto. Everything is gray, slushy, twig-silhouettey.
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So much in the air these days – love, fear, connection, disconnection. And I feel this growing sense of loneliness. Research says 1 in 2 American adults feel “lonely” now – which is worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. I know the feeling! Felt it for years. In and out of relationships. Many / most of us have!
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Wondering about loneliness, and eager to learn more about what creates healthy connection and community, made me reach out to 76-year-old Oxford Professor Robin Dunbar, most famous for coining ‘Dunbar’s Number.’
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I had my mind blown by the gleeful, quick-of-tongue, anthropologist-evolutionary-psychologist who offered so much context, history, and advice on how we live rich, full, connected lives. I just dropped the chat as my first-ever video podcast.
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Also, I’ve been working with a few folks at the Toronto District School Board to think about how to ban cell phones from classrooms. After I spoke to principals a sixth-grade teacher told me “Phones ring all through class. They know there’s no ban. And, trust me, it’s always the parents calling.” Does your school board ban cell phones – or have some policy? (Let me know what’s working!) Btw: I think the best researcher on this topic today is NYU professor Jonathan Haidt who is publishing wonderful work and whose new book "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Ilness" drops March 26, 2024. (I pre-ordered my copy from my local indie but I see Jon just tweeted it's on sale at Barnes&Noble)
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Anyway! What do we do when things feel like a lot?
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READ! MORE! BOOKS!
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Scroll down for reviews of the books I read this month...
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Neil
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PS. Oh, and every January I remind you this Book Club is one of four email lists I have. You can also get my midnight awesome thing, bi-weekly blog post, and/or full-moon podcasts. Adjust your dosage right here.

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1. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman. A prophetic 30-year-old manifesto about the dangers of pervasive technology by NYU professor Neil Postman, who died in 2003 at age 72. A book that illuminates the algorithm and AI conversations we’re having today. I first heard of this book while reading “It’s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly” in The New Yorker by Cal Newport (excited for his, too!) where he calls this book Postman’s “masterwork”. It’s not nearly as famous as "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (picked by Mitchell Kaplan in Chapter 16!) but it sure is a sloshy bucket of ice-water to the face. The book opens by saying, yes, of course, technology gives us great riches, unfathomable riches, but that it also takes something away. (He excerpts a fascinating couple of 95-year-old paragraphs from Freud.) Postman then says “once a technology is admitted, it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do. Our task is to understand what that design is – that is to say, when we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do it with eyes wide open.” Yes! I think of the mere 5000 days we've had with social media and the seeming eye-opening we're going through now. There's so much Technology Archaeology here with Postman endlessly pulling out sandy shards from 500, 1000, or 2000 years ago. The book was written in 1992 (I love 1992!) but honestly feels like it was written tomorrow. Casts that wide a timescale. Sample sentence from Page 10: “In introducing the personal computer to the classroom, we shall be breaking a four-hundred-year-old truce between the gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word.” Everything is backed up with a fat Notes, Bibliography, and Index, making this book much shorter than it seems when you pick it up (199 pages!). And Postman's an artist, too. I love when he references fiction like: “As described by Farley Mowat in "The People of the Deer", the replacement of bows and arrows with rifles is one of the most chilling tales on record of a technological attack on a tool-using culture. The result in this case was not the modification of a culture but its eradication.” He quotes poetry, he quotes the Bible, he quotes C.S. Lewis. It's a spellbinding magic trick of an enormous mind. And the result is a bubbling manifesto cautioning us against the “technopoly”. Which is? “… a state of culture [and] a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.” Hmmm, OK. And what permitted this so-called “technopoly” to flourish in America first? Many things! Including “American distrust of constraints”, “the genius and audacity of early American capitalists”, and “the success of twentieth-century technology in providing Americans with convenience, comfort, speed, hygiene, and abundance so obvious and promising that there seemed no reason to look for any other sources of fulfillment or creativity or purpose.” If this sounds meaty, we’re only on Chapter 4, and get ready because Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Watson, and Einstein are all quoted in the next paragraph. Meaty, my friends. Probably need to read it five times to understand it. And I disagree with some, for sure. But that’s what makes it great. Illuminating, relevant, flying-through-time-portrait of our historical relationship with technology and potential implications for our cultures, communities, and relationships as we alllll fly together right now in warp speed. Highly recommended.
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​2. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind. Oscar nominations just came out! I was thrilled to see ‘Past Lives’ nominated for Best Picture. Leslie and I loved it so much we went back to theaters to see it again. And then I reached out to Celine Song, writer, director, genius (debut!) filmmaker, and she kindly agreed to chat about her 3 most formative books. And, of course, as is the case with almost every book to almost every person, I hadn’t heard of any of them. Her first two formative books, Bohumil Hrabal’s "Too Loud a Solitude" (11/2023) and Stefan Zweig’s "Chess Story" (11/2023), were good. Not must-reads, but, you know, good, solid books. But this! Her third formative book is on another plane. Celine calls it “sumptuous.” Sumptuous, yeah. Rich. Decadent. Overwhelming, in some ways. For one thing, Süskind has the world’s greatest ability to create “smell-portraits”. On Page 1 he’s describing the stench of France in 1738: “The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots.” He does this over and over: olfactorily yanking us into a scene. “People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease.” Yet, somehow, it’s a speedy plot, too. The book tells the life story of poverty-stricken, nasally-gifted, slumdog-orphan Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from his birth in the “most putrid spot in the whole kingdom” on July 17, 1738 through his zero-to-hero-to-zero-to-I-won't-ruin-the-ending arc as a perfumer to a “hot day, the hottest of the year” in Paris on June 25, 1766. This 28-year span is told with a scene-creating vividness that reminds me of David Mitchell ("Cloud Atlas" [06/2019], "Black Swan Green" [11/2016]). I found myself amazed, disturbed, and awed by this book. It had a tug. A pulling. It did that thing novels do, which is to offer a range of emotions unlike almost anything else. Books rattle from the inside. This book is a rattler. Read the Plot Summary if you want. Written in 1985 in German (as ‘Das Parfum’) it has been on Der Spiegel's bestseller list for decades and sold over 20 million (!) copies. Yet: The author, now-76-year-old Patrick Süskind, is a ... recluse. No one knows where he lives. No one knows what he looks like. Heard of him? I hadn’t! And yet: 20 million copies make it one of the top-selling books of the past century. Mysterious! Adding this to my TBRA as it surely deserves To Be Read Again. Next time I may try audio. If you want to go audio, try Libro or Libby. Highly recommended.
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​3. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. This is the 1966 back-of-the-bus New Journalism view of one of the birthplaces of the hippie movement. What birthplace? The one where "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest" author Ken Kesey races headfirst into the not-yet-illegal world of LSD with his revolving band of 10-14 friends (aka the “Merry Pranksters”, who included Neal Cassady and future members of The Grateful Dead) as they drain six figures of Kesey’s book royalty payments to fund a just-purchased-just-spraypainted school bus drive across America to share their newfound light-bright awareness with the world. Uh, seems to have worked!? From Steve Jobs to Elon Musk to Tim Ferriss, it feels like LSD has penetrated the culture. It’s extremely wild to hear, really hear, what’s coming out of the mouths of people trying it over 50 years ago. Now, I found the first 100 pages of this book the best 100. That’s the bus trip coming together and the actual drive. Rest is what happens after. But the trip! Geez, what a trip. You’ll feel like you’re right there …. right there getting into an argument with a Texan gas station attendant when a dozen of your unwashed stoned friends suddenly line up outside the gas station bathroom … right there in the humbling cold-shower moment your wild rambunctiousness hits the ceremonial seriousness of “the-other-LSDers”, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (pre-Ram Dass) … right there setting up banners and painted road signs to invite the Hell’s Angels to your house to introduce them to LSD. This book is a vibe and most of my life I would have chucked it before finishing the first fifty chaotic pages. But I loved, loved, loved "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (08/2018) and "A Man in Full" (04/2019) and felt I owed it to Tom Wolfe to keep going. And then at some point, I finally realized: Ohhhhh. This is ... how it was. He’s writing it this way to make you feel ... like it felt. What a magic trick! (I later found an Author’s Note on Page 415 where Wolfe writes: “I have tried not only to tell what the Pranksters did but to recreate the mental atmosphere or subjective reality of it.”) No kidding, Tommy! Maybe tell us before next time. Anyway, the net result is an unbelievably-inside inside view of the culturally shifting mid-60s where you get to play Ken Kesey or, more realistically, the only sober one at Ken Kesey’s house. Non-fiction journalism fused with avante-garde poetry. And the whole time, I cannot say this enough, you feel right there … right there with friends getting insomnia saying insane things … right there with friends stripping down and jumping in ponds … right there careening down steep mountains hills on the roof – the roof! – of the bus. Cop teasing! DMT experiments! It’s all here! And it comes wrapped in the general late-night party feel of both excitement … and exhaustion. A helluva book.
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​4. Going Up! by Sherry J. Lee. Illustrated by Charlene Chua. You are a happy, smiling young Black girl in a gray sweater and checkerboard plaid skirt baking cookies with your dad before heading up to the 10th-floor Party Room for a birthday party in your downtown apartment building. Going up! Next floor pop in happy, smiling Santucci brothers – white redhead bikers in shredded skull tank tops and arms full of tattoos. Going up! Next floor pop in a happy, smiling, birthday-balloon-toting lesbian mixed-race couple with their giant sweatered dog. Going up! Next floor pop in happy, smiling Mr. and Mrs. Habib, in a sari and kurta pyjama with happy, smiling grandkids Yasmin and Jamal holding a bowl of gulab jamun. And the book keeps going up! Lots more floors after that. A raucous celebration of community, diversity, and apartment-building love. I adored this book. Get it read aloud to you on YouTube right here.
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​5. My Wild and Sleepless Nights: A Mother’s Story by Clover Stroud. We haven’t done a Leslie’s Pick in a few months! Time to bring it back. Enter Leslie: “My dear friend Kelly sent me this book in a package from London with a handwritten card that said ‘You have to read this. When you’re done, pass it on to Heather.’ Unfortunately, I couldn’t pass it on to Heather, because I folded down too many pages, underlined too many sections, and already can’t wait to read it again. (I did send her a fresh copy!) Clover attempts to answer the question, ‘What does motherhood feel like?’ I have never read such a poignant, detailed, accurate, beautiful, staggering, vulnerable account of motherhood (the only other book that does this, about the first year of motherhood, is 'Brave New Mama' by Vicki Rivard). She talks about the pain of breastfeeding, sex as a mom, the judgment she feels over having a fifth child, how she craves giving birth as a way to touch where life and death collide, how messy her house really gets, and the grief she experiences as her eldest becomes a teen. This book took my breath away and made me feel connected to mothers around the world and through time. I kept on turning to Neil saying, ‘Please, can I read you another paragraph? Just one more!’ because Clover put into words experiences and feelings I haven’t been able to articulate. An absolute must-read for anyone who knows, deep in their heart, what motherhood feels like but can’t quite put it into words, and for anyone who is curious about the deep emotional soul of motherhood.”
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​6. Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way to Swim Better, Faster, and Easier by Terry Laughlin with John Delves. I learned how to swim in my 30s. Bit late to the game! A childhood full of ear infections and tubes left me starting swimming lessons when I was a decade older than all the other kids in the three-foot pool. I sputtered, sank, and swerved my life the other way. Now in my 40s, after a few "Adult Learn To Swim" classes, in a story I sometimes share in keynote speeches, I can stay afloat and do the front crawl ... but not much more. Enter this book! My friend Frank Warren sent it to me and it’s like having a swimming coach in your pocket. Simple things, like “reshaping the vessel”, help teach swimming with less effort. How? By consciously pushing your airbaggy chest down so your legs come up – helping to avoid the log-floating-in-a-pond posture I typically use! What else? Learning that “what you do between strokes is more important than how you take the stroke.” Uh, what you do between strokes? Right! Lengthen your body! Less drag. And it goes on and on. I actually took this book with me to the public pool a few times, got my courage going by reading a few pages or a chapter, and then jumped in to try. Did the book turn me into an Olympian? No. It did not. But it gives me new things to try and I can feel my Swimming Confidence nudging up and up.
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​7. The Complete Elfquest by Wendy Pini and Richard Pini. At the end of Chapter 35 of 3 Books with Jen Agg, I played a 1-833-READ-A-LOT voicemail from 3 Booker Gavin from Longmont, Colorado who shared how Elfquest, a comic that ran over 40 years starting in the 70s, was formative to him. He then recently wrote me, four years later, to see if I ever read it. Well, I hadn’t, but I thought 'This sounds like a great gift' and bought it for my oldest son. He opened it Christmas morning and … we didn’t see him much over the next few days. He fell into the transportive, visually dense 720-page (!) odyssey of Elfquest. I just asked him what he thought and he says: “It’s good, dad. Really good. So basically, it’s about these elves, who live in a forest, and there are humans they fight against, and one day the humans use fire to burn down the woods, and then the elves go down to the troll caves to survive, but then the trolls betray them and lead them to a desert, and they can barely survive there, and then they meet another tribe of elves, and first they fight with them, but then they start working together, and then the leader of the elf tribe who lived in the woods leaves to look for more elves, and they find the high ones, which are their leaders.” For fans of adventures and quests. Think Percy Jackson! Big thanks to Gavin for the tip-off. (If you have a formative book you’d be willing to suggest or share with me, just give me a ring at 1-833-READ-A-LOT. It’s a real phone number! I listen to every message and for six years I’ve played a voicemail at the end of every Chapter of 3 Books. If I play yours I will sign and personalize and mail you a book – anywhere in the world. I love analog, phone call, crinkly envelope communities.)
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​8. Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen. There is nothing like a Jonathan Franzen novel. Nothing like it! Pulsing, messy, scabrous, erotic, reflective, breath-holdy, shocking, punchy, illuminating. Plot twists! Pitch-perfect dialogue! ‘Okay, okay, but what are they even about?’ Leslie asked me as, once again, we found ourselves struggling to zip a suitcase with a 600-page hardcover on top. ‘A family drama, basically,’ I said, ‘With the first 400-ish pages in this book taking place over literally one day, on December 23, 1971. Then the final 200-ish pages are the following few months.’ And what a family drama! We follow the Hildebrandts – father Russ, mother Marion, and four kids ranging from college-age Clem to high school social queen Becky to drug-dealing tenth grader Perry to little, almost invisible Judson – as they navigate complex inner-outer lives around their church in the fictional small town New Prospect, Illinois. Every chapter gives each character’s unique perspective and backstory – alternating in that ‘Babysitter’s Club Super Special’-style – until the slow-pounding 200-page fireworks display at the end. Every private, embarrassing, scandalous thought – it’s there. The characters might be dark – but there’s a humanity, a beauty, an inner-inner life, that Franzen exposes like almost nobody else writing today. Perry resolves to quit smoking weed! Clem feels morally compelled to sign up for Vietnam! Becky sets her sights on the churchgoing folk singer! Secretly-psychiatric-seeking Marion struggles to make sense of her past in a remarkably lifelike appointment with her therapist aka “the fat dumpling.” And Russ! I don’t know where to begin. He’s churchy, nerdy, horny, and has an almost “violent pacifism.” This book is a trip. You’ll walk across “unrecent tire tracks”, feel the stare of “that glower of his”, and watch “resinous knots of juniper explode in orange sparks.” 10/10 on character, 10/10 on plot, this is a twisting acrobatic plunge into the deep pool of literature. I might suggest starting with "The Corrections" and then "Freedom", but if you’ve read those, and even if you haven’t, "Crossroads" will take you far, far away. A book to help us stare slack-jawed at something in ourselves while adding some taffy and fillings to the human experience. Let it plug in a few holes, and chip a few others away, while we collectively race across this endlessly fleeting blur called existence. Highly recommended.
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​9. There is no 9! Just our usual jumble of lootbag links. Let's start with a string of wonderful quotes from Robin Dunbar. Oh, and I just challenged myself to list my Top 25 Movies Of All-Time. I was super-thrilled after interviewing Susan Orlean but my kids were not impressed. I like this personal lunar calendar app. A short article by Derek Sivers about a "walk and talk" – a great way of getting together with people you admire. "The proliferation of smartphones and social media mean that young men and women now increasingly inhabit separate spaces and experience separate cultures." My 7-year-old's zen koan jokes. Super Bowl quarterback Kurt Warner reminds us about context. I just learned 'fishes' is a real word! (Now can we go back to octopi?) Brad Stulberg reminds us we are mirrors. Why we should get offline and talk to strangers IRL more. And the movie Leslie and I saw on our last date night! Thanks for reading all the way to the very end. 3521 words later and you made it!

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Interested in more of my reviews? Read my monthly book clubs or visit my Goodreads page.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - November 2023

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,
​
How you holding up?
​
Our place has been full of midnight fevers, junkyard dog coughs, and screams from the basement. "More tissues! More tissues!" Poor Leslie has gone down with the ship. Been the ship, really. She was, however, in top form on her first-ever feature podcast. We just dropped it as a Bookmark called "Tips to Be a More Peaceful Parent."
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I also released a longform "live from New York" conversation with human rocket ship Sahil Bloom. And on the next full moon (Monday!) I'll be dropping a chat with Ralph Nader. Still fiery! Btw: If you're new to the pod start with David Sedaris, Brené Brown, or Quentin Tarantino.
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Last thing! Our Book Of Awesome – the first awesome book in a decade, written collectively with all of you! – drops in paperback on Tuesday. It's got a new HOT PINK cover and I put a review in below. Grab a copy for you or someone you love right here.
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The world does not want us to read books! Every screen seduces us farther away from the deeper, richer world of compressed wisdom waiting for us in the pages. I love our reading rebellion. If you know someone who'd like to join us send them here.
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Here are my book recommendations this month!
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Neil

1. It's OK To Be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders. I remember reading a New York Times Op-Ed by Bernie Sanders a few years ago called "The Foundations of American Society Are Failing Us" and being struck by the clarity, concision, and power. Apex communicator! (He just wrote another Op-Ed four days ago called "Justice for the Palestinians and Security for Israel.") Do you see what I mean? The world is just so messy, blurry, and overwhelming and we need penetrating voices – master distillers! – to offer us clear views. Bernie is one 82-year-old elder doing just that. This book contains ten passionate, rallying-cry chapters that smartly fold together stories, research, and reminders about big laws that were headline news for a few weeks a few decades ago but have disappeared as news. The result is some kind of slow, almost grotesque, pan shot of the state of the US. Chapter sub-heads include phrases like "Health care is a human right, not a privilege", "Children should be taught to think – not educated to be cogs in the machine", and "Political reform requires alternatives to a for-profit media system that dumbs down and diminishes debate in America." Each chapter is its own manifesto and I found my heart beating faster and faster while reading. "If someone were to offer a senator $100 to vote for or against a piece of legislation," he writes on Page 116, "it would, by any court of law, be considered a 'bribe.' Taking that bribe could land that person offering it – and the senator taking it – in jail. If that same person were to put $100 million into a super-PAC for that senator, their spending would be considered perfectly legal. It would also, if successful, win the donor a very close and grateful relationship with a very powerful elected official." We know truths like this, but Bernie has a way of spelling them out in arresting ways. "Made you look", he always seems to be saying. "Our struggle is against a system where the top twenty-five hedge fund managers in the United States pocket more money than 350,000 kindergarten teachers." Exactly. Or how about on Page 124 when he shows how the US spends more than double, per capita, on health care than the UK, Canada, France, or Germany, and yet ranks at the bottom on longevity, accessibility, and coverage. "In other words, we are getting a terrible return on our huge expenditure on health care." You can skip around the book. I flipped past some rehashes of election campaigns or specific bills but loved the more elevated macro-level ideas he borrows from countries around the world such as the zoom-in on learning from Finland's education system. (Spoiler alert: elevate teaching standards through pay and trust, reject standardized testing, ban for-profit private schools, etc.) The book shares how the US got where it is – and what can be done to unwind a lot of the damage. Do I agree with everything? Of course not. Books aren't brains – they're views. But there aren't many views more pointed, sharp, and passionate than this one. Highly recommended.
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​​2. Chess Story by Stefan Zweig. A hundred years ago Stefan Zweig was one of the highest selling and most translated writers in the world. This is the first book I've read by him and I can safely add: For good reason! He had a tumultuous life. In 1934 he fled Austria for England as Hitler was gaining power but then, years later, ended up listed in the 'Black Book', which convinced him to flee further to Brazil. I imagine him writing this tight, gripping 84-page "one long boat trip across the Atlantic" novella on his … long boat trip across the Atlantic. It tells the story of a group of people who encounter the chess world champion on their boat! They challenge him to a game! He soundly defeats them! But then … another challenger emerges with a haunting past and the story swerves wildly. A short book to help you get back on the reading train. Vivid, welcoming, and a pace that accelerates as the story goes on. This is Zweig's last book and was submitted to his publisher just two days before he and his wife died by suicide in Rio.
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​3. Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. Do you know the poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas? I thought I did! But I think I really just knew that one line – "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light" – from like a dozen different movies. I never ingested it, you know? Fanned it in slowly like perfume. Because that's what it deserves. It's a stunning bit of writing. I suggest reading it here and then listening to Dylan Thomas reciting it here. If you feel something there I think you'll love the high-flying literary acrobatics in this much longer 1954 BBC radio play transcript that Dylan wrote just before his death at age 39. This is truly one of the most wild things I've ever read. I found it hard to take in more than a fraction of what was going on -- but the words, you'll see, they just keep pulling. Under Milk Wood is a 95-page fast-paced "day in the inner lives" of a small Welsh town. That's it! But the wordplay, the twisting – it's got a vibe like Lincoln in the Bardo (04/2018). Here, take a look, this is two pages near the beginning, featuring an inner conversation between Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard and her two dead (though still alive in her mind!) husbands, Mr. Ogmore and Mr. Pritchard:

Mr Ogmore: I must blow my nose.
Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard: In a piece of tissue-paper which I afterwards burn.
Mr Pritchard: I must take my salts which are nature's friend.
Mr Ogmore: I must boil the drinking water because of germs.
Mr Pritchard: I must take my herb tea which is free from tannin.
Mr Ogmore: And have a charcoal biscuit which is good for me.
Mr Pritchard: I may smoke one pipe of asthma mixture.
Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard: In the woodshed, if you please.
Mr Pritchard: And dust the parlour and spray the canary.
Mr Ogmore: I must put on rubber gloves and search the peke for fleas.
Mr Pritchard: I must dust the blinds and then I must raise them.
Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard: And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.

There's a lot of moving parts here and it adds up to something insightful, absurd, and genius.
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​4. Too Loud A Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. If you're living under a stable government, thank your lucky stars. The Czech Republic wasn't so lucky in the twentieth century as they went, in order: monarchy, republic, parliamentary democracy, Nazi invasion, communist state, Soviet invasion, and then, in 1989, revolution. Bohumil Hrabal lived through most of that over his 83 years from 1914 to 1997. No wonder in the 1950s he joined an underground literary collective before his right and ability to publish was fully banned. Yet his writings lived on a samizdat – a word I just learned combining sam ("by myself") + izdat ("publishing house") – that was a form of dissident activity where censored books were hand-copied and hand-handed-out. This fiftyish-year-old book was a fascinating read on a few levels. Slim, dense, first-person narrative of an old man near the end of his 35 years working as a paper crusher who secretly finds and stashes rare books he comes across … taking them home and sleeping among them. There is a unique, scattered, mentally anguished, psychologically overwhelmed feeling throughout that I found both addictive and sometimes too much. The "living under an oppressive regime" vibes come through. Yet it adds up to a wonderfully unique read. "I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain" writes Hantá, the narrator, "I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me. My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books…" Indeed! The New York Times boasts in a cover blurb that this is a "remarkable story about the indestructibility of books and knowledge". Sure. But there's also a lot of pain. A book for forever-reading readers who want to take a dim, literary trail less traveled down one fascinating little string of our infinite pasts. "When I read," says Hantá, "I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel." If you relate to that you'll find a lot of sentences to love in here.

5. Our Book of Awesome: A Celebration of the Small Joys That Bring Us Together by Neil Pasricha. Time flies! It was a year ago that Our Book of Awesome came out and you know what that means: Paperback time! And for the first time ever my publisher decided to dramatically change the paperback cover, too. Hot pink! Why? Well, my fault: I pushed for the original "rainbow on black" motif that was successful for The Book of Awesome thirteen years ago. Only problem? People thought it was that book not, uh, an entirely new collection. The book spent a few months on bestseller lists but I'm told it didn't hit with the walk-by, what-is-this, lemme-take-a-look crowd. So bring on the pink! I'm really proud of the book and I think you'll love it – it's my highest-rated book on Goodreads – and imagine it on bedside tables, backs of the toilet, or as gifts for a great teacher. The book is ultimately about community with the awesome things as a unifying force in the face of all the pressures and overwhelm in the world. I wrote about 80% of the writeups (maybe 300 new awesome things) and the rest are curated from over 10,000 awesome things submitted by all of you from around the world. I also sifted in comments, entries, and letters to try and give it a "we're all hanging out together" vibe. So it's over 400 pages full of awesome things like: Completely nailing the timing on that avocado, When you're getting a package delivered when you're on an important call and the dog doesn't bark, Showing old people how to do something on their phone, Discovering a shortcut the GPS doesn't know about, and Sending a private message during the video conference and then seeing your coworker look down and silently smirk. Here's the tweet string I wrote sharing where the book came from. And some sexy press when the book came out includes NPR's Here & Now, CBC's The Current with Matt Galloway, Maria Shriver's Sunday Paper, and The Rich Roll Podcast.

6. Smart Sex: How To Boost Your Sex IQ And Own Your Pleasure by Dr. Emily Morse. Dr. Emily takes readers on a beginner's A-Z course to pleasure and intimacy. She starts off pretty far back from the starting line: talking about how masturbation won't give you hairy palms, for example. But the road steepens when she gives lists of "Sexual Bucket Lists" (a long laundry list of sexual acts for you and your partner to privately mark off "yes", "no", or "maybe" to and then share back) as well as exercises that include lists of questions to ask to open conversation you may not have had. ("Which celebrities turn you on?", "What is the freest sexual thing you have ever done?", "How do you feel about getting drunk or high for sex?", etc). Her tone is sort of People magazine-y: light, loose, educational, sometimes awkward. (Page 223: "Anyone with an anus can enjoy pegging.") I think this is a good book for anyone learning about sex – filling in gaps in the sex-ed curriculum, with material presented thoughtfully and engaging – but overall a bit of a skimmer.

7. Childhood Unplugged: Practical Advice to Get Kids Off Screens and Find Balance by Katherine Johnson Martinko. I was speaking to a sixth-grade public teacher last week. "It's getting bad," she told me. "A few years ago maybe one kid in my class had a phone. Now half do. They're texting in class. I ask them to put their phones away and we can still hear them all ringing. I sometimes go answer them from the coat cupboard and it's always the parents!" Hmmm. I asked a principal what percent of principals he thought might support a cell phone ban in schools. "I'm not sure," he said. "At least 90%." Sometimes when everyone has an addiction it looks like nobody has an addiction. Smartphones are still a new technology but before they completely enshroud and cajole our behavior, often with devastating consequences, it's healthy to take pause, read books like this, and then figure out our way forward. Pair this with Jonathan Haidt's recent articles "Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health" and "Social Media Is A Major Cause Of The Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here's the Evidence."

8. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. "Marley was dead: to begin with." Definitely on my top 10 list of Best Opening Lines! This is a must-read if you, like me, never took the time to wade into the story beyond the culture-penetrating Disney knockoffs. George Saunders made this one of his three most formative books and I love finding different versions of it in used bookstores and falling back into it again and again. The book is short! Less than 100 pages usually. It's a big gulp. Or just read two pages a day and you'll be done in no time. This 1984 edition I just found is 122 pages with a lot of full-page paintings by Greg Hildebrant. Much shorter than Dickens other classics and perfectly timed for the holidays. Plus, given it's 180 years old (!), you can grab it out of copyright on Project Gutenberg.

9. You made it to 9! But there is no 9, my friends. Just some random salty bag fries at the bottom: I really love Nick Cave's Red Hand Files -- especially his recent advice to "Sing, Eugeno, sing." I put together a list of 7 books I recommend reading before bed (instead of the news). A cozy Canadian painting. A cartoon that haunts me. The original trailer for 'Our Book of Awesome'. And, lastly, I really enjoyed the first three episodes of the new podcast from Mark Manson.
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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - October 2023

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,
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Happy end-of-October.
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Right now Toronto sidewalks are deliciously crunchy. We've got sheet-ghosts hanging from branches and Leslie and the kids wrapped almost everything on our porch in cobwebs. We have a ninja, werewolf, The Flash, and golden retriever going out this year.
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I missed the decorating because I was on the road last week. Recording a podcast and sharing our messages on living intentionally with good people in Orlando, Chicago, Catalina Island, Irvine, Dallas, and then Chicago again. You know the messages: delete social media, get the phone out of the bedroom, practice morning journaling, get outside, read a book, phone a friend, hug your family.
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Hypocritically, I was largely in airports and very far away from my family while saying this. Sure, Leslie and I still keep a family contract, and yes, video-calling helps—but nothing replaces time. The ultimate tension. The biggest countdown. We really do only get 30,000 days here. And that's if we're lucky, of course.
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I was thinking about time a lot this month while reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships by Robin Dunbar. I think you'll like both—and reviews are below, along with a few others.
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How we spend our time is how we spend our lives, of course.
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Thanks for a bit of time together this month,
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Neil
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PS. I just switched email servers so if anything looks different or this email landed somewhere strange—that's likely why. It's still me!

1. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. This book had me at the jump. The very first sentence had a magnetic, pulling "WTF-I-want-to-know-more" effect. Pretty sure I actually moved my head closer to the page. 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—really holds us tightly. She describes scenes in high-def, folds characters in that shock and surprise, and keeps the plot jumping. The story pinballs between decades, characters deepen, and every door opened up is graciously closed. I think if you liked that opening scene of The Social Network—with Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) on a bad date and both characters fast-talking in a frenetic, snappy back and forth—then you'll probably like this book. Similar brainy-Cambridge core, lots of screen time, and characters who sidle up and occasionally chafe. (Page 257: "It was easy to dislike the man; it was harder to dislike the little boy who existed just below the surface…") So what's it about? 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 raw jealousy, and unrequited love, just to name a few. Fast-paced, warm-hearted, and a wonderful belly poke for your inner 90s gamer, too. A book to fall into. A joy to read. Highly recommended.
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​2. Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships by Robin Dunbar. First off, I was very confused by this book's cover. What are all these blue-black words? It took me a moment to realize the title and subtitle are down there at the bottom. But forget the cover! I'm sorry I brought it up. Let's move inside. Where there be gold! Solid gold. Robin Dunbar is such a cheery brain to hang out with. He starts off quickly: "Perhaps the most surprising finding to emerge from the medical literature over the past two decades has been the evidence that the more friends we have, the less likely we are to fall prey to diseases, and the longer we will live." Sound bunk? He thought you might say that so he casually dips you into the research covering, no big deal, 300,000 people across 148 studies. And it's not "fill out your mood on a scale of one to five" that these studies measure, either. It's lifespan. "Hard-nosed", Robin calls it. And so, okay, when you look at this giant body of research what does it ultimately all boil down to? In maybe the most powerful point in the book he writes "… it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that you can eat as much as you like, drink as much alcohol as you want, slob about as much as you fancy, fail to do your exercises and live in as polluted an atmosphere as you can find, and you will barely notice the difference. But having no friends or not being involved in community activities will dramatically affect how long you live." Heeeeeeeeeeeeads up. Time to reinvest in your connections with those close to you. Call your parents. Call your siblings. Be active and generous in your fantasy football group text. And sidenote: What is a 'friend'? They are relationships "all about a sense of obligation and the exchange of favors—the people you wouldn't feel embarrassed about asking for a favor and whom you wouldn't think twice about helping out." To color the definition in he also says "being on a Christmas card list is a marker." Is your list smaller than it used to be? Mine too. And it doesn't help that we spend more and more time alone as we get older. So what do we do? Unplug. Get offline. Meet in person. Sign up for live events. Plan holiday dinners. Laugh together. Cook together. Walk together. Exercise together. Go to concerts together. Be aware of the rising disconnection in our increasingly connected world and invest in two-way friendships that will pay massive dividends as we age.
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​3. Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki. How many Japanese novels over a hundred years old have you read? None? Me too! Until now, that is. I stumbled on this classic while wandering in a bookstore—the power of bookstores!—and was originally captivated on my flip-through by the format: 110 chapters all a page-and-a-half long. Turns out the book was serialized in the Asahi newspaper back in 1912. I imagine it like some kind of slow-moving textual soap opera that satisfies just by introducing you to characters that slowly grow to feel like people in your life. The novel tells the story of a boy's relationship with an old man he meets and calls Sensei. The story doesn't feel profound—although occasional bits of wisdom are sprinkled throughout—but I found the book a slow burn and easy mental wind down before bed. Slumber-inducing! I've been going on a lot of "two pages of fiction" rants lately and this book is seemingly written to satisfy that goal. Translator Meredith McKinney writes how the book is a true reflection of the time and read by every Japanese school child today with themes of "isolation, alienation, egotism, and profound dislocation from its cultural and moral inheritance." A transporting journey into Japanese life at the end of the Meiji Period—the 44-year-long "coming out" era beginning in the late 19th century that pulled Japan from the isolationist, feudal 250-year-long Shogunate onto the global stage.
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​4. Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results by Shane Parrish. Somewhere near the first day of Shane Parrish's MBA program at the University of British Columbia a student he'd just met got into a loud argument with the professor. He became so incensed he quit! Like he actually stormed out of the classroom and drove off with tires screeching type thing. Shane told me he asked the storming-out guy why he was leaving and he yelled some parting words to Shane along the lines of "They aren't teaching us anything important here. You want to know what's important? Read Charlie Munger!" Then the guy literally drives right out of Shane's life. But he leaves behind … that clue! An impactful one. Shane looks up Charlie Munger and discovers he's co-head honcho, alongside Warren Buffet, of mega-conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway. And, like Buffett, Munger has left piles of essays, speeches, and wisdom on all things investing and life. (Much of it collected in Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit & Wisdom of Charles T. Munger [04/2020]) Shane begins parsing and distilling Charlie's wisdom onto a covert blog he titles with a series of numbers based on the zip code of Berkshire Hathaway's address in Omaha, Nebraska. He finishes his MBA, works for a time as a Canadian spy, and then makes his blog public. He calls it Farnam Street, one Berkshire-Hathaway-address-field less granular than the zip code, and the blog grows to fan and feed Shane's appetite for all things wisdom, knowledge, and penetrating truths. Alongside his popular The Knowledge Project podcast (I was a guest in 2019 and 2022) and his massive Sunday morning Brain Food email list, Shane has become an expert on all things "thinking about thinking." With the endlessly overwhelming nature of the world, I have long appreciated Shane's ability to "separate signal from noise", and now comes his first major book release since that ride began. It's different from the blog but a fun and easy read that combines anecdotes, personal stories, and research in short and (yes) clear chapters. He begins in a Talebesque way by sharing the "enemies of clear thinking": The Emotion Default, The Ego Default, The Social Default, The Inertia Default. Then he tells us how to build strength: Self-Accountability, Self-Knowledge, Self-Control, Self-Confidence, etc. And then he gets into "clear thinking in action" which includes defining the problem, exploring possible solutions, evaluating options, etc. A valuable and generous book I know I'll revisit again and again.
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​5. I'm Thinking Of Ending Things by Iain Reid. I remember when I got obsessed with Charlie Kauffman: sitting in the tiny art cinema The Screening Room in Kingston, Ontario twenty-five years ago with my first girlfriend. We were blown away by Being John Malkovich and while watching the credits roll I saw "Written by Charlie Kauffman" and was hooked. What does Kauffman represent? Some kind of gonzo-creative, elegantly-twisted type of writing. (His next two movies were Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). So when I saw Charlie's blurb on the cover of this book—"An ingeniously twisted nightmare road trip through the fragile psyches of two young lovers. My kind of fun!"—I was like, okay, I must read this. Am I glad I did? Yes and no. It's a psychological thriller with short chapters and sparse, flying prose, nearly all taking place as mental self-talk of a young, slightly disturbed woman riding shotgun on a dark drive to meet the parents of this new guy she just started dating. Bit of a Get Out vibe. But, of course, how well does she really know him? And why does her phone keep ringing? And what's up with these strange voicemails? If you liked books like The Girl on the Train or Dark Matter (12/2016), you'll probably like the book. It's a little less tied together and climactic than the opening suggests. But a fast, fun, and, yes, "twisted" read.
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​6 and 7. The Little Book of Woodland Bird Songs and The Little Book of Backyard Bird Songs. I started birding during the pandemic. How cliché! I remember my "spark bird" fondly—that Rose-Breated Grosbeak I saw sitting on a power wire out my window while setting up a makeshift virtual office. (This was back in the "Sure, go ahead and take a bedroom" phase of the pandemic—just a few months before the "Get your loud meetings to the basement" stage.) Why do I love birding? It helps me slow down. Take a pause. Gain some perspective. It helps me move, see, connect—with the land, the air, the water, this whole place we're living in. I love thinking about species beyond our species and life beyond our life. I love the majesty of birds, the trivia of birds, the painted plumages, the wild mating calls. I love bird podcasts. I love life lists. I love "What's This Bird?" and meeting new friends on the (ad-free and spam-free!) community on eBird. So say you're with me. You're bird-curious, at least. Now how do you get kids into it? First up, buy kids binoculars! (Adult binoculars are too heavy for my little ones.) Next, grab these two books. Both introduce kids to birds in a big, bright, simple way—with bird calls on the side for endless entertainment. (No, it's not easy to take the batteries out on long car rides but maybe you'll find yourself singing and hooting along.) The Little Book of Backyard Bird Songs features the House Wren, American Goldfinch, Red-Winged Blackbird, Killdeer, House Finch, Great-Horned Owl, Blue Jay, American Robin, Northern Cardinal, Mourning Dove, Song Sparrow, and American Crow. And The Little Book of Woodland Bird Songs has the Red Crossbill, Hermit Thrush, Black-Capped Chickadee, Common Loon, Red-Eyed Vireo, Sharp-Shinned Hawk, Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher, Purple Finch, Barred Owl, Wild Turkey, and Downy Woodpecker. Twenty birds—and bird calls!—to inspire all the birders or birders-to-be in your life.
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​8. There is no 8! Just a loot bag of links. First up, Leslie and I just wrote a new article for CNBC and it's been algorithmically declared successful. Also! The moon is full at precisely 4:24 PM EST this afternoon and that's when I'll be dropping a chat with Sahil Bloom on topics like Parkinson's Law, cold plunges, phone-free walks, 5am writing blocks, opportunity versus energy, and so much more. I flew to New York to interview Sahil and there's a pile of powerful prescriptions in this one. Join us on Apple or Spotify. I enjoyed the first 30-45 minutes of Sam Altman on Joe Rogan (got a bit rambly after that) and it's nice to see Sarah Silverman starting her podcast up again after many months. If you missed it I thought her conversation with Tim Ferriss last year was wonderful. Susan Cain wrote a really powerful piece for her wonderful Kindred Letters email list called "Some thoughts on the horrors we face". Tim Urban pointed me to this video of a snow leopard mom pretending to be scared to help teach her kids. I posted a little string on the biggest ingredient for long-term happiness as well as this fascinating billboard I walked by in LA. Thanks for reading all the way to the very, very end! Have a wonderful month and I'll talk to you soon. Oh, and if someone forwarded you this you can sign up to join us righhhhhhhhhhhhhhht here.

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Interested in more of my reviews? Read my monthly book clubs or visit my Goodreads page.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - September 2023

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Happy end-of-September! 

Leslie and I are getting ready for our 5-year-old's birthday bash tomorrow. Did you have a giant 5-year-old birthday party? I still remember my sister (always the popular one) inviting her entire class over and the image of kids yanking each other down our brown-carpeted stairs by their pink stockings before wolverining into a massive slab of bright green mint-chocolate ice cream cake is firmly etched in my mind. Me, I usually had one friend over for the big day. Two on a big year!

This year I felt like I shared it with a lot of you. I started an annual tradition of writing birthday advice and, in case you missed it, here are the '44 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 44.' Thanks for all your well-wishes. 

And now let's get to the books... 

Neil

PS. If you have a friend who'd like to read more books they can sign up to join us right here... 

1. 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) and Story Club (my favorite Substack on anything). 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 I went to Costa Rica I stopped by to ask Kyle at Type Books if he could recommend short books. Slip-in-that-useless-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." A get-you-back-into-reading book. Highly recommended.

2. 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 like you're sitting beside him 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 average 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, the height of the wave, gets gradually smaller. 5 are really intense relationships closest to you ("shoulders to cry on" friends), 15 are "best 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. Despite the fact that we have very recently decided to live in teeming cities of 10s of millions of people our brains haven't changed — and neither has the size of our friendship circles. 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. The book is much more conversational ("good-meandering") than you might expect but a detailed Table of Contents and Index can help you skip around. 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. Highly recommended. (PS. Who else suddenly wants a 'number' named after them so they can be cool like Dunbar, Avagadro, or Planck? I'm going to hereby declare Pasricha's Number to be the number of pages you have to read in order to say you read the book. For fiction, it's every page [minus any front or back matter] and for non-fiction, it's all the front and back matter [plus at least one chapter inside.])

3. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. First Joan Didion anything I have ever read. I remember when she died December 2021 there was this massive outpouring. I read her New York Times obit, a post on Instagram from Kelly Oxford, and remembered Lori Gottlieb had chosen The Year of Magical Thinking — Joan's Pulitzer-prize winning 2005 memoir of mourning after her husband's death — as one of her 3 most formative books. But who was Joan Didion? And where exactly do you start with a writer who's won every award but also has 77 (!) unique titles listed on Goodreads? Filter by reviews to see what's popular? Suuuure, but even then you get seven books with over 10,000 reviews. Maybe just wait a year or two for something to call your name? That works! This novel, written in 1970 and repackaged in a striking 2005 FSG Classics edition, grabbed my eyeballs when I was down at Type Books. Picked it up, started reading, and was met by something distinctively ... harsh. This book has sharp teeth. And yet, it's not really about... anything. Or anyone. I used to think books could be separated on a spectrum with "plot" on one side and "character" on the other. Well, Play It As It Lays picks up and drop-shatters that brittle idea by instead being almost entirely about tone. You can feel the California sideways sun setting against the 60s modernist homes with designer furniture inside the whole time. Did you see The Virgin Suicides? Not really about character or plot. But you remember the tone, right? The opening paragraph on the back cover kind of tells you this: "A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, plumbing the emptiness and ennui of a seemingly bankrupt society in spare sentences that scour and disturb." I'd never heard of sentences scouring. ("To rub hard, especially with a rough material...", says Merriam Webster.) Yet that's what they do. I have no notes from this book. No quotes pulled. No pages folded. It looks like I didn't read it. Yet I read every word. Because of that tone. Hypnotic, ruthless, sometimes I hated the book. Sometimes I didn't understand it. But I found myself always picking it back up, pushing through a confusing chapter or two, and then hitting another scene that stunned me. Sort of reminded me of Nine Stories by JD Salinger (06/2020) that way. Here, I'll flip the book to three random pages right now and pick a sentence out to show you. Here goes: "She lay on the couch, her eyes fixed on a bowl of dead roses, until four o'clock in the afternoon." (Page 182), "All along she had expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would crash if she boarded them in bad spirit, as unquestionably as she believed that loveless marriage ended in cancer of the cervix and equivocal adultery in fatal accidents to children." (Page 73), and "When they finally did it they were on the bed and at the moment before he came he reached under the pillow and pulled out an amyl nitrate popper and broke it under his nose, breathed in rapidly, and closed his eyes." (Page 153). Joan Didion, I still don't know you. And it might take a bit of time before I grab another one of your books. But you hooked me. And we'll talk again.

4. The Birds Of Costa Rica: A Field Guide by Richard Garrigues and Robert Dean. I met Scott Broad when I was 9 years old. My sister and I were moving to the town next door that fall and my parents had the idea to sign us up for day camp at our new school before the year began. On the first day, a counsellor got up and said "Okay, lot of lost and found stuff in this box from last week. Please come grab your stuff. Let's see, we got three tennis balls ... bunch of hats ... a pair of boy's underwear ... a pair of girl's underwear." And that's when Scott leaned over and whispered "Wonder what they were doing?" I liked him right away. Flash forward thirty years and I became a birder in the pandemic. Surprise, surprise, he did, too. We downloaded Merlin and eBird and started comparing "life lists." I turned into a "walking around the downtown park" type birder and he ended up building a giant floating 'hide' and trekking down to muddy lakes before sunrise to take endless photos (like this one or this one or this one). Last month, for the first time in our lives, we went on a trip together. A birding trip! Both firsts. We picked a country with a lot of birds and a direct flight: Costa Rica. We had four days to bird from sunrise to sunset (with a little owling after dark.) And before going we bought copies of this guide to all 903 birds ever seen in Costa Rica. We circled our "Dream 100" and flew down with a couple pairs of binoculars, one big fat camera, and some far-too-serious camo shirts. Every day we went looking for birds from sunrise to sunset and then returned to our hotel rooms to peel off our sweaty socks and open this book to check off, circle, and make notes of everything we'd seen. The guide is superb — calling out the 90 or so endemic birds and (importantly) giving us the specific field marks that, with Scott's pictures, helped us distinguish the birds from their nearest lookalikes. We ended up seeing 226 species including the Resplendent Quetzal, Red-capped Manakin, Long-tailed Silky Flycatcher, and Lesser Violetear. If you're going birding in Costa Rica — and by golly, you should! — then this is the guide for you. Pura Vida! 

5. Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon M. Sheldon, and David Schkade. We all want to be happy! And this is a famous 2005 fifteen-page research paper that pulls the big topic apart. The link goes to the direct download and it's a wonderful read. The paper opens by discussing the "enduring U.S. obsession with how to be happy" with research (always research) showing that the majority of U.S. residents "think about happiness at least once every day." For good reason! Happy people, after all, experience "larger social rewards (higher odds of marriage and lower odds of divorce, more friends, stronger social support, and richer social interactions), superior work outcomes (greater creativity, increased productivity, higher quality of work, and higher income), and more activity, energy, and flow." That all? No! They also are "more likely to evidence greater self-control and self-regulatory and coping abilities, have a bolstered immune system, and even live a longer life." No wonder we all want this! Are happy people just self-oriented though? Is this a narcissistic aim? No, turns out happy people are "more cooperative, prosocial, charitable, and 'other-centered'." The paper discusses pessimism, defines happiness ("frequent positive affect, high life satisfaction, and infrequent negative affect"), shares that famous model of what determines happiness ("50% genetic set point, 10% circumstances, 40% intentional activity") and then goes deep into some of these activities. Like "practicing gratitude and forgiveness", "thoughtful self-reflection", "the successful pursuit of life goals that are intrinsic in content", "the inclination to avoid social comparisons", "exercising regularly", "being kind to others", "pausing to count one's blessings", and "devoting effort to meaningful causes." And much more. It's an academic paper, yes — but a dense and fruitful read to help reflect and recenter us on what matters. 

6. Sicker In The Head: More Conversations About Life And Comedy by Judd Apatow. I've loved Judd Apatow since August 2001 when I saw my first episode of 'Freaks and Geeks' in my Lower East Side apartment in Manhattan where I was living to work for a comedy-writing startup in Brooklyn. (I share a longer version of that story here.) There was a certain nerve he was twanging that I hadn't felt twanged before and when you see how deep he's plumbed the art and science of comedy, it kind of makes sense. So here comes the follow-up to his 2015 interview collection Sick In The Head and, sure nuff, it's another dense collection of longform interviews between Judd and comedians like Sacha Baron Cohen, Samantha Bee, Ramy Youssef, Will Ferrell, and Pete Holmes. You hear the genius below the comedy like Sacha Baron Cohen on Page 372 saying "... there are two things, and they're not necessarily connected: There's the product, and then there's the ability to sell that product. There's a difference between whether the product is good and whether the marketing campaign is good." Amen. Unlike the first book where the interviews were conducted over decades, these ones are all largely of the "since the pandemic" variety and, as a result, there's a bit of a post-success tone here. More "two winners talking" versus the "one artist sharing their secrets to a young Judd with a clipboard who banged on their door in 1982" tone in the original. A lot of Judd here — his stories, his experiences, a giant glossy photo spread with him with a bunch of famous people. In the first book he was a student so the vibe was more classroom than coffee shop. I preferred that. But hey, longform interviews with George Saunders, Neal Brennan, and Lin-Manuel Miranda don't come round often so this gem slips nicely on the shelf between Sick In The Head and Poking A Dead Frog by Mike Sacks (08/2017). (PS. Very cool that Judd's donating all profits from the book to the Dave Eggers-created tutoring and literacy organization 826 National.)

7. Tough Boris by Mem Fox. What do you get a 5-year-old for his birthday? I went down and asked Doug Miller of Doug Miller Books for a suggestion and he handed me this gem. "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 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 the 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, finally, "And so do I." A heart-stirring tale somehow told with only 71 words. Complete picture book mastery. Highly recommended.

8. There is no 8! Just our usual pile of loot-bag links. 3 Books guest one moon ago, Lenore Skenazy, dropped a big New York Times Op-Ed "This Simple Fix Could Help Anxious Kids." (If you're paywalled out try here.) Also, have you heard of Nick Cave's 'Red Hand Files'? It's one of the most arresting emails I subscribe to — basically, just Nick answering a question about once a month. Check out a sample post here from a 20-year-old disillusioned with our "bizarre and temporary world." My wife Leslie emailed me Dr. Becky Kennedy's TED Talk "The Single Most Important Parenting Strategy" and it's wonderful. Read the transcript if you're in a hurry! Ugh: In the past 20 years fentanyl and suicide have overtaken car accidents to become the #1 cause of death for people aged 18-44. The Guardian lists 33 great Substack newsletters (via Austin Kleon who's got a great one!) I had a good time seeing Dr. Andrew Huberman live in Toronto with a crew from Othership — never been in a room before where 2000 people scream when "deliberate cold exposure" or "Peter Attia" are mentioned. I am somewhat repulsed by how fear-oriented Apple's new brand introduction video is and yet ... they have so perfectly figured out how to dial and push our emotional buttons that now I want to buy everyone an Apple Watch. I've admired Surgeon General Vivek Murthy for a long time and it was great listening to him sit down with master interviewer Rich Roll on an urgent deep dive into loneliness and the perils of social media.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - August 2023

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Thank you for being here.

I started this email list in 2009 when things started heating up on my blog 1000 Awesome Things. I sent a monthly "friends n' family update" to my mom, dad, sister, and, well, everyone I knew. Like a hundred people? I wasn't doing well at the time -- and was excited for a bit of light.

After that I started getting asked to give talks and I would always take a blank piece of printer paper and write "Keep in touch with Neil!" at the top in pen. I wanted friends. Ten or twenty of you at a time gave me your name for so many years. Thank you for being here.

In 2016 I started sending this monthly book club and today you're here with 33,722 others. (This is the largest of my four newsletters.) It’s been largely word of mouth, too. Never paid a cent to "drive traffic" or "grow subs" or anything. No ads paid, no ads displayed. I write every single word here — always have, always will. And I think of it as a note between friends. 

A lot of you have popped emails back over the years. I've met some of you in person. I've said things I regret to others. And, you know, I've just been thinking how everyone reading this is alive (93% of us are not!) so I want to make sure I tell you how much it means to me that you're here. This relationship means a lot to me and I am very grateful for it.

So, yeah, just — thank you for being here.

Now let's hit the books...

Neil

1. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. “We had a great conversation,” my Uber driver Afzaal said to me, on the wet and dark black street in front of my house at nearly two in the morning on a Thursday. “Through that ... amazing book.” With his permission I’d clicked on the backseat light and read us both the final chapter on the drive home from the Toronto airport. I had found the book seven hours earlier at Warwick’s airport bookstore in San Diego after speaking at Brian Buffini’s Mastermind Summit . Travel was bumpy – turbulence, delayed flights, an eleven-minute connection through terminals at O’Hare that required my best Forrest Gumping, but … I wasn’t really there, anyway. I was in 1930s and 40s Arkansas, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Mexico, and San Francisco, following the childhood of Margarite Johnson – “Mya sister”, as brother Bailey coins her early – in a poetic, accelerating retelling of her life from age 3 to 16 where she goes “from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware.” A thirteen year period that starts with her taking a train cross-country with only Bailey (who was 4!), away from her parents' “calamitous marriage”, helping their grandmother run a store in the black neighborhood of Stamps, Arkansas, and then yo-yoing between caregivers and traumatic events. There are hard scenes a-plenty – hiding her uncle from the Klan under a pile of produce, sexual abuse at age 8, learning to drive in Mexico down the side of a mountain with her dad on a 12-hour bender away from his girlfriend, living alone for a month in a junkyard where the kids all enter dance competitions to get money for their rusty automobile commune, to bashing through sticky racial ceilings and becoming the first San Francisco trolly conductor of color … and on and on. I found the book started slow: a kind of elongated still-shot of a small dusty hardscrabble southern town standing in the long shadow of slavery. I skimmed a couple chapters in the first half. But then it started picking up halfway through and never stopped. Fight scenes and sex scenes and “looking up vulva in the dictionary” scenes and … so much more. Told with an unflinching honesty and a turn-of-phrase that gets more and more poetic by the page. I learned this is the first of seven books in Maya Angelou's extensive autobiography which she wrote publicly from 1969 (this book) all the way up to 2013. She died at age 86 the following year. Highly recommended. 

2. Never Lose An Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Retention by Joey Coleman. When I worked at Walmart it was almost laughable how much more money we paid to hire “the next great exec” – some swooping superhero from Home Depot or whatever – rather than spend even a third or half that developing our own superheroes within. I worked there ten years and my last job was Director of Leadership Development. I made the boardroom presentation a handful of times. When internal leaders are brought in well – and brought into the fold well – they last longer, perform better, and are, bonus, cheaper. This book doesn’t make that case. It’s not pretending to be a big-idea “why” book – but wow is it ever a really, really good “how.” You want great people? Wan to bring them in well? Set them up for success? Joey Coleman has written my new favorite book on the topic. I’ll be recommending it to any leader -- small business or big! -- who tells me onboarding or retention or turnover are issues for them. The book is holistic – aimed at organizational cables and pulleys versus ‘you, the intrepid leader of people’. Joey organizes the book well and every section is full of his “it’s so obvious but I’m telling you with a giant gobsmacked smile so you don’t have to feel bad” tone with many fascinating (and snackable) business case studies throughout. (And I see Joey has posted the first three chapters on his website right here if you want to take a peek.) A wonderful guidebook for HR folks and leaders of large teams who want to invest in more trusting relationships with their people. Highly recommended.

3. The Call Of The Wild by Jack London. “He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed." This paragraph comes late in this 120-year-old classic by Jack London but, to me, it's a kind of long subtitle on the book’s central thesis. Quick backstory: Leslie and I did our customary Library Pit Stop on our way out of town last month and we met Shaka (pronounced like "Boom-Shaka-Laka") -- an entrancing, twirling, gushing librarian who practically sashayed around the kids section filling us all up with energy and excitement for books. My kids were all left smiling huge smiles holding crinkly piles of sticky hardcovers in front of their faces. And I remember when he added this book to the pile, too: “Oh, and you must get ‘Call of the Wild’... it's a Canadian classic!” It was meant for my oldest son -- though Common Sense says 12 and above. -- but he was buried in Percy Jackson. I cracked it open and took Jean Craighead Jones's advice in the first sentence of her 2002 Foreword to “Open this book to chapter one and start reading." What a great line. I skipped the rest of the Foreword. And she was right: I was quickly sucked into the story of Buck, the "tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair" who lived "at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley." Things were looking good there for about a page till he gets dog-napped and sold into roped-in servitude on a mushing dogsled in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush. The second chapter where Buck is "broken" is extremely violent and made me wonder if the book was too old for my kid. But the story is entrancing – and it's only 199 pages in like 20-point font. A quick read that exposes people of all ages to the wild -- and it’s call. To the call of the wild. See if you're howling with Buck by the end like I was. (Oh, and if you want a fascinating 15-minute bio -- check out Jack London on Wikipedia.)  

4. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Once every year or so I see my wife Leslie just fall into a book and everything else falls away. That happened this month with her Leslie’s Pick: “If you’re like me and sometimes slip out of reading into binge-watching shows for a couple months (real talk over here) then this book is just what you need. Juicy, delicious, a touching commentary on power, love, fame, and being a woman -- but not overly profound. Kept me up late for a few nights and I'm still sad it’s over.”

5. Hike by Pete Oswald. I counted only 52 words total in this glorious, evocative, soul-transporting picture book about a father and son driving up the mountains for a day-long hike -- birds! tracks! snow! -- that doubles as an ode to a generational tradition. And now I've spent 52 words telling you to read it. (See inside here.)

6. Paradais by Fernanda Melchor. This is the closest book I have come to censoring from my own Book Club. Not for any political reason – but because the extended final scene is so horrifically lurid and violent that I can’t stop remembering it and I’m not sure I want to encourage you to remember it, too. Feel like I’m handing a Stephen King to a 10-year-old. Which somebody did to me, btw. I get why – by the end, I loved the book and loved reading in a way I just hadn’t before. But also: I replayed scenes from 'The Dark Half' for years. (Sidebar: What Stephen King book would you recommend somebody start with? At what age?) But ... I’m not censoring it. Because this is the most well-paced, three-dimensional, raw emotional spasm of a book I have ever read -- and I found it completely gripping. REWIND! I first picked up ‘This Is Not Miami’ (04/2023), the collection of gritty non-fictionish short stories taking place around Veracruz from emerging Mexican author Fernanda Melchor. It blew me away and looked her up and found out Fernanda had also written two novels in her 30s. Two! And both were, no joke, long- or short-listed for the Booker. Just, you know, the prize that went to ‘Midnight’s Children’ by Salmon Rushdie, ‘The God Of Small Things’ by Arundhati Roy, ‘Lincoln In The Bardo’ by George Saunders. NO BIGGIE! Who was this caped literary crusader? I had to know. So I raced over to Type Bookstore on Queen Street West – where we had Our Book Of Awesome's launch! – to see what the fuss was about. They were sold out of ‘Hurricane Season’ so I picked up ‘Paradais’, this 112-page novel with a jarring red cover of a ... blue apple? And wow it hit me 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. Entire novel told in a single breathless rant. Really! Like, even though the book is skinny I was originally put off on The Bookstore Fan Flip by the sight of many, many full pages without a single line break. Plus no table of contents, no chapter names, no chapter numbers. But I couldn't stop reading. 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. Highly recommended. 

7. “Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets” and “Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince” by J.K. Rowling. I am simultaneously reading the second and sixth Harry Potters to two of my kids these days. (I don’t always do it but I enjoy having a “read-a-loud” on the go with each kid – just think of keeping "the bridge of reading" as an open-for-business place for us to meet and hang out on.) I'm not sure if I've ever said this here but I ... loved Harry Potter growing up. Loved it. I had a Harry Potter bedspread... at university. Waited in line at midnight for the last few. I remember being 25 years old reading The Half-Blood Prince at four in the morning on July 16, 2005 thinking “I am reading this with the first people in the entire world -- the truest of the true!” (Who else was right there with me? "Half-Blood Prince" sold 7 million copies in the first 24 hours -- a record shattered only by "Deathly Hallows" which sold 11 million and, yes, holds the Guinness.) Interesting revisiting them nearly 20 years later. Stories hold up! That's the big thing. Characters, too. Hagrid is much bigger in the book. Snape Snapier. Dumbledore has a real twinkle the movies washed away. I have enacted a controversial rule in my house that my kids can't watch the movies until reading all the books. (Agree or disagree?) As I cracked them back open I was debating whether I should read Hermione as “Hermy-onee” as I mentally did till I saw the movies but, ultimately, I decided to Trebek it and really go all-in on voices. The adverbs are just killing me this go round -- “Hermione said, impishly”, “Harry said, feverishly”, “Ron said, imploringly" -- and it's almost like JK was in a secret game with herself to also shatter the Guinness record for Most Adverbs. Which she most assuredly did. "The road to hell is paved with adverbs", said Stephen King, and these books might make you believe it. The important thing, though, is that I am still mesmerized by the way she unrolls the map as the story expands. Book Two opens up with Harry at Number Four, Privett Drive, where his uncle is cautioning him not to ruin his big business dinner downstairs. Book Six opens up with the Prime Minister of England hearing a sniffing behind him and it's Cornelius Fudge who just shot down the chimney to tell him that that devilish Tommy Riddle was behind the suspension bridge disaster and all the other terrible recent headlines. (According to her own blog on March 16, 2006 -- thanks Wayback Machine! -- JK tried opening Books 1, 3, and 5 with this same scene but it only worked in Book 6 after "thirteen years in the brewing.") Masterful storytelling in both -- just so much grander, vaster, deeper as the series progresses. Now, given that 500 million Harry Potter books have sold -- and people share, but it's a series -- I'm guessing 7 billion people have not read them. If that's you: Consider this a push. Do it! Read them! Borrow them! Buy them! Once you push past the first two the last five books offer storytelling at its most powerful.

8. There is no 8! Just some loot-bag links down here. How about: "Tom Hanks thinks he's only made four 'pretty good' movies" in The Guardian (happy to see Cloud Atlas is one), "Aw shit, this is not my car!", Tim Urban offers a great relationship mental model on being a "Loving Teammate versus Angry Parent", I like Jack Dorsey announcing he's deleted Instagram and Brad Montague's note on his relationship with Rainn Wilson. Also! You may know August is the only month this year with two full moons. So bonus 3 Books chapter! "Live in the spa” interview with hip-hop legend Jully Black on the first one -- artistic longevity, forgiving ourselves, navigating the death of our parents -- and a conversation with free-range kid evangelist Lenore Skenazy coming on the exact minute of the next one. Closing question: If you were speaking to a room of 750 public school principals in 3 days and could only tell them one thing … what would it be?

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Interested in more of my reviews? Read my monthly book clubs or visit my Goodreads page.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - July 2023

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Happy end of July! 

Toronto public schools ended right on the buzzer of Friday, June 30th so Leslie, me, and our kids started the month feeling a bit fried.

We leaned deep into family time and I ditched my phone for a few weeks. I find handing Leslie my phone and asking her to hide it pretty anxiety-provoking ... but it eventually blossoms into liberating. I find it helpful to tell myself: “You're not as important as you think.” (Maybe we all need to force vacation a bit more?)

Felt grateful for lots of time this month swimming, hiking, birding, and, of course, reading. I kept a giant canvas bag of books with me wherever we went and decided to just pull out and read whatever I felt, whenever I felt. I read maybe an hour a day – before bed, mostly – and enjoyed this “follow the energy” approach. Did I finish every book? No! But finishing is overrated. (And one of our values!) Beware clogger books and do what you need to do to keep turning the page. 

Over on 3 Books, I’m experimenting with a new format called Pages. Since a lot of our 125 (!) Chapters clock in at 2-3 hours, I’ve created Pages to be little wisdom snippets under 333 seconds each. The show remains 100% ad-free with no sponsors, promotions, commercials, or interruptions of any kind. Come join us on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. 

Also, finally got all Book Club Back Issues posted on Neil.blog. Of course, every issue is delivered warm and freshly pressed to inboxes first. If you know someone who likes reading, they can join us right here. 

Now let’s hit the books! 

Neil

1. Fire Weather: The Making of A Beast by John Vaillant. Did you see the photos of New York City masked in smoke from fires burning thousands of miles away? Who else’s kids were asking if today’s air quality index means recess is getting cancelled again? The scene reminds me of that post-apocalyptic Sigur Rós music video (track 1 from ( )).  Right now in Canada, there are over 900 wildfires raging with more land burning by July this year than any other full year since they’ve been tracking in the early 80s. It’s time to get up, up, up, and over this story to see a much fuller picture than headlines provide and this is the book to help us understand what’s happening and why. John Vaillant takes the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire – which led to the largest mass evacuation in North American history and incinerated thousands of homes down to piles of nails – and uses that disaster as a crowbar to pry open an astonishing treasure chest containing our bigger relationship to … fire. Pure and simple. Fire! What it actually is, how it actually behaves, what our relationship has been – and ties it all into what’s happening now. You might scoff when he asks early in the book if fire is a living thing – but you won’t be laughing as you keep reading. If you’ve read any of Vaillant’s previous non-fiction, like The Golden Spruce or The Tiger, you know he has a stunning ability to write cinematic non-fiction, painting endlessly vertiginous, large-scale, centuries- or millennium-long histories, on everything from energy, industry, climate, and how it all works and doesn’t work today. Highly recommended. 

2. The Library Book by Susan Orlean. I got a reply to last month’s book club (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. I am here today to tell you 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.” Right. 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 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. Highly recommended. 

3. Crow by Amy Spurway. I spent an hour in the wonderful independent bookstore Armchair Books high up in Whistler last month and stumbled on this bright yellow novel on display near the front. Is it about birds? I thought so but no! It’s a funny, big-voiced, debut novel from Cape Bretonor Amy Spurway. (With Ducks on 03/2023 I’m suddenly on a Cape Breton roll.) Crow is the spicy, depressive protagonist – a woman in her mid-30s who gets jilted from her engagement in Toronto, discovers she has a terminal illness, and then moves home to live with her mom in rural, you guessed it, Cape Breton. Crow’s voice is loud – crass, vulgar, sarcastic, speedy -- and it’s what kept me going through a seemingly endless parade of tough-to-love characters and a plot that feels a bit bloated. Still, it’s worth reading for the voice and its accompanying cozy-home feeling of living in Crow’s impoverished community of eccentrics on an island in the Atlantic Ocean where everybody knows everybody and nobody’s business stays private for long. 

4. A Sand County Almanac: With Essays On Conservation From Round River by Aldo Leopold. The pandemic pushed us farther indoors and online where we were fed digital pellets that titillated, rewarded, and, ultimately, cajoled. Join Threads! A bastion of free speech! A vibrant global town hall! Sure, uh, the business model is stealing all your data to sell you more stuff. But that’s the price of being connected these days, right? Wrong! Being connected, really connected, is often about unplugging. Stepping outside. Getting into nature. Sparrows, foxes, streams, trees – listening to what they’re saying and connecting, reconnecting, with the vaster worlds around us. Am I tweaked from concurrently reading Fire Weather by John Vaillant? Maybe. But more and more I believe attuning, reattuning, ourselves to the natural world is a critical life skill that’s fast falling away as we step deeper into the matrix. On average, we only spend 7% of our days outside right now – the lowest level ever in recorded history. Do we think there’s no downside to chopping our access to things just because we can’t measure them? Spending a couple of hours a week in nature is associated with better health and well-being. And Dr. Qing Li's research on 'forest bathing' shows deep time in nature lowers blood pressure, lowers stress hormones, lowers anxiety, lowers anger, and improves sleep. Maybe trees just have bad advertising? Nobody boosts Instagram posts that say “Turn this thing off and go for a hike, dummy!” But we should. Good use of tax dollars. Because when we ground and reconnect ourselves to the broader energies of the world we reduce stress while feeling a deeper connection with all living things. If you resonate with this then I have a seventy-five-year-old billboard for you: this collection of passionate and inviting essays by renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold. Aldo died fighting a forest fire in 1948 while also working as a conservation advisor to the United Nations. This after years with the US Forest Service and Wilderness Society. Gone too soon but in his life’s wake he left us this astounding collection of essays on the natural world. The book opens with a 98-page “nature diary” broken into the months of the year that truly make you feel like you’re living on a Wisconsin farm in the 1920s. (Pairs well with Little House In The Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, reviewed 02/2018.) Endless astute and poetic observations of the relationship between mice and owls or the mating displays of American Woodcock deepen awareness to the natural world. Reminded me heavily of Thoreau’s diaries (09/2022). From that opening piece, you can jump between essays for the next few hundred pages – mostly republished from notable bird or wildlife magazines. This is a good book to read in a hammock with a strip of birch bark as your bookmark for when you fall asleep. Aldo's essays squeeze out bits of wisdom sap, too. On Page 181 he writes “The man who cannot enjoy his leisure is ignorant, though his degrees exhaust the alphabet, and the man who does enjoy his leisure is to some extent educated, though he has never seen the inside of a school.” And on Page 212 he says “Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relation with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.” Thank you, Aldo, for the gift. And thank you, J. Drew Lanham, for pointing me to it. 

5. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. For a 93-year-old book, this book sure has a modern structure: Fifteen different characters offering short, first-person viewpoints of the dramatic couple weeks during which family matriarch Addie Bundren dies and then has her body carried by her husband and children over Mississippi backcountry to be buried. I loved the voices – a potentially problematic poorboy pidgin – but couldn’t figure out what was going on. So I decided to take the advice Ryan Holiday gave us back in Chapter 38 and just unapologetically take a time-out to read the full Plot Summary on Wikipedia before diving back in. No book guilt, no book shame. Did I love it? No, not really. I felt a bit like I might be watching Citizen Kane without realizing how many things it did differently because they don’t seem that different anymore. I like that it was crazy modernist for the 1930s but if you want fresher modernism I might suggest If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler by Italo Colvino, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, or Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders. (What would you add to that list? Just reply and let me know…) 

6. That Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means: The 150 Most Commonly Misused Words And Their Tangled Histories by Ross Petras and Kathryn Petras. It’s been a while since we’ve added a book to our Enlightened Bathroom Reading series. This one makes the porcelain mantle. Lemme ask: Do you know the difference between imply and infer? Barter and haggle? Podium and lectern? Don’t worry! Neither does The New York Times, The Washington Post, or Barack Obama! Each of these 150 little (bathroom-sized) essays opens with a headline or speech excerpt by someone using the word wrong before a slightly-acidic-but-ultimately-empathetic explanation of the difference. So, for example, they’ve got a sliver of Obama’s eulogy for Senator Ted Kennedy where he says “We can still hear his voice bellowing through the Senate chamber, face reddened, fist pounding the podium…” and then chime in to say that, actually, “a podium is a raised platform where a speaker stands to deliver a speech, so Obama’s vivid image of a red-faced Ted Kennedy in a Senate speech pounding the podium makes for a surprisingly gymnastic congressional session.” Meanwhile, a lectern is the “raised, slanted stand where a speaker places notes for a speech.” Some writeups will illuminate, some you could write yourself, and others may trigger that “Oh, yeah, right, of course, of course" reflex. Petras and Petras (a high-flying brother-sister publishing business, I learned) do a good job of weaving everything together and they helpfully close each essay with the bolded dictionary definition – if you need to skim because your sister is banging on the door to use the shower, etc. Btw: “When you imply, you’re the speaker. When you infer, you’re the listener” and “When you’re bargaining over the price of a rug, you’re haggling… whereas bartering is trading, exchanging goods or services without using money.” No need to haggle over the price of this one. Fun vocabulary tuneup. 

7. My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop. Poll: Is owning your own bookstore the a) best business in the world? or b) worst business in the world? For fun let’s say you must pick one. No in-betweeners! Okay, hands up if you think that owning your own bookstore is ... the best business in the world. Okay, yeah – some hands, lots of hands. Great, hands down, hands down. Now: hands up if you think owning your own bookstore is ... the worst business in the world? Some hands, now lots of hands. Bit of a tossup. Maybe it is the worst business? Could it be? After all, your inventory turns maybe once a year, you spend evenings and weekends lifting heavy boxes of heavy things, and, you know, whenever you actually sell a book you take home a few dollars which, after rent and staff, leaves you with what? A nickel? Or, wait, that’s way too harsh. Best business in the world people: Could you be right? I hope you’re right. Maybe truly nothing is better than swathing yourself and your community in an invisible, invaluable blanket of collective wisdom from our forever-shared past. You basically live in a room at the furthest possible progressive place of our neverending cultural conversation. And by being right there – picking books, suggesting books, talking about books – you participate and further that conversation. You’re at the intersection of all the things we know so far and all the things we’re learning. What could be more important than that? I voted a) in the poll. Least that’s the headspace I got to after flipping through 80-something luminaries – Ann Patchett, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Dave Eggers – sharing a little essay celebrating their favorite bookstore. Not as good as visiting Fiction Addiction in Greenville, Rainy Day Books in Kansas City, Powell’s in Portland, Munro’s in Victoria, or Books&Books in Coral Gables, but hey – it was the next best thing.

8. The Best Nest by P.D. Eastman. My sister-in-law gave me this book last year with the inscription “Neil! Happy birthday to you … someone who models contentment, loving what you’ve got, and taking good, good care of your nest! To you + the birds!” Beautiful sentiment from a beautiful person, but, just being honest, contentment might be the opposite of what I’ve felt most of my life. (Not sure a content person would spend the past five years writing 3 books, recording 100 podcasts, giving 300 keynote speeches, writing 1000 awesome things...) Contentment is a bit of a north star to me. Somewhere I'm heading even if it’s somewhere I never fully reach. (I was a bit of a robot when Leslie and I met.) So, I appreciate the gift, I’m glad I’m putting out some contentment vibes, and this little inner conversation is all probably why this colorful 1968 picture book by P.D. Eastman (most famous for Go, Dog! Go, one of Douglas Rushkoff's 3 most formative books) hit me hard. Just instead of the “husband bird in blue paperboy cap” being content or the “wife bird in the pink bonnet”, I felt like, you know, both. I’m Mr. Bird who sings on the first page “I love my house. I love my nest. In all the world my nest is best!” and also Mrs. Bird who screams on the next “I’m tired of this old place. I hate it. Let’s look for a new place right now!” Place being a perfect metaphor for everything, of course. In the book what follows is a fairly predictable series of unfortunate looking-for-a-new-home situations before the birds ultimately find each other back at the first nest. Still, it’s the opening two pages that stick with me. “I love my house. I love my nest. In all the world, my nest is best.” Maybe the book leaves us with a trite but helpful gratitude-forcing mantra to sing to ourselves whenever we’re eying the next ... anything. “I love my house. I love my nest. In all the world, my nest is best.” 

9. There is no 9! You read all the way to the bottom so it’s time for a little loot bag of links. I enjoyed J.R. Moehringer’s behind-the-scenes-of-a-ghostwriter piece in The New Yorker. I got text-flooded when my recent CNBC piece got sprayed all over Apple News. I know a chunk of you are getting this email because you heard me on The Rich Roll Podcast – hello! – and I'm currently listening to Rich with Judd Apatow and Tim Ferriss. My inner trivia nerd is forever-addicted to the Harper’s Index – here’s the past one, two, three! – and I’ve been introducing more and more people lately to the (relatively) new Sound ID feature on the Merlin ID App. “Shazam for birds,” everyone calls it, and totally free from Cornell. A few of my recent rants: "We're losing our capacity to engage with books”, “How we think about happiness is backwards”, and “How to restart a reading habit". I'm going viral on TikTok! Reminder to grab a kSafe if you’re addicted to your phone like me. Dr. Peter Gray on "Play Deficit as Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Health". George Saunders keeps teaching us all to be better readers and writers (I am a paying member of his Story Club and highly recommend it.) As I mentioned at the jump I'm trying out a new short-form episode format called “Pages”. Call me at 1-833-READ-A-LOT with your thoughts! And, finally, thank you for reading. I am grateful to hang out over the electronic mail. I am grateful to you forwarding and suggesting this email to your friends. (They can sign up here.) As always, please feel free to send me a reply to this note. I read every one and always send a few letters back. 

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