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,
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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.

Click here to join the Book Club email list.

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,
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How you holding up?
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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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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - June 2023

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 June.

I have a new article up on CNBC sharing five little habits I (try to) do every day.

Flew to Texas twice recently for two of the deepest conversations we've had yet on 3 Books. Come hang in a church in Dallas with billionaire entrepreneur Suzy Batiz or in a stump garden in Houston with former NFL player Martellus Bennett.

Now raise the squeaky red curtain as, for the 80th straight month, I'm sharing a review of books I just read and enjoyed...

Neil

1. Dancing In The Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich. Rich Aucoin is a Canadian musician who puts on orgasmic, sweaty, high-energy shows full of dancing, confetti, and … carnival … in the truest sense of the word. We struck up an online friendship after I learned he was using quotes from my book on resilience in his performances. He suggested a while back that I read this book – so I did that thing where you buy it and let it marinate on your bookshelf for a few years. I then got another out-of-nowhere prompt to read it from Jonathan Haidt recently and then I knew: It was time. There’s word of mouth and then there’s word of mouths, right? So, if Sex At Dawn (04/2022) is the long evolutionary history of sex then this book is the long evolutionary history of dancing – or, more generally, “collective effervescence”, as Émile Durkheim calls it, which Barbara Ehrenreich cites, in this thorough, iterative, pace-by-pace introspection of our human compulsion to moooooooooove. From "Dionysus to the Grateful Dead", as the cover blurb says. “Why should humans be rewarded so generously for moving their bodies together in time? We are also pleasurably rewarded for sexual activity, and it’s easy to figure out why", she says on Page 26. But ... dancing? Why do we feel the need to dance? To share in collective body-moving joy? In the “She Don’t Use Jelly” encore, in the drumbeats before the playoff game, or even in the galvanizing closing words of a speaker at the end of a supply chain conference. We’re up, we’re crying, we’re cheering, we’re moving, we’re doing all this – why? Well, back to Barbara, “to be ‘outdanced’ is to risk reproductive failure” for the simple reason that for much of our history “early humans probably faced off predatory animals collectively – banding together in a tight group, stamping their feet, shouting, and waving sticks or branches.” Do you buy this? We do still sort of do this. Bear swings by we’re told to exaggerate our height – swing sticks, make ourselves big! "Predators might be tricked by synchronous behavior into thinking that it faced – not a group of individually weak and defenseless humans – but a single, very large animal.” Could today’s dancing be part of yesterday’s evolutionary success story? Yes, says Ehrenreich! And then for much of the book, she goes on to share how the higher-level we – structures we created around church, governments, and civil structure – sought to stamp out “collective effervescence”, because it’s hard to control and helps the masses accomplish massive things, only to have our endlessly dancing ways blow back and back and back again. Ehrenreich shares how “ancient Greek elite did not abandon the old ecstatic rituals but simply took them underground” with sixth-century BCE groupings that “drew on social elites, whose members gathered periodically for secret rites apparently aimed, above all, at engendering collective ecstasy.” From there through the advent of the church to the “riots” of 50s rock-and-roll to the “carnivalization” of professional sports, this is a well-strung-together cultural portrait that feels something like walking down a long wall reading a thoughtful museum exhibit. Down with virtual! Up with live! For the rest of our days may we all seek to organize, participate, and join in-person "collective effervescence." Highly recommended. 

2. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel by Ocean Vuong. A first-person coming-of-age story of a gay Vietnamese boy in Hartford, Connecticut finding and losing love in fleeting glances. Maybe that’s what the one-line movie summary of this book will say in TV Guide. But if they make this into a movie – and it sure feels like they will – then it will lose some of its soul. Because this is really a 240-page poem where “The room is silent as a photograph” and “The bus’s lights make it feel like a dentist’s office gliding through the wet streets” and “A handful of straggling stars were biting through the sky’s milky haze.” I mean, maybe if it's in some Terrence Malick Tree Of Life way – maybe. But it’s a poem. I found it both a fast read – no giant halting words type thing – and a slow read – with at least one sentence per paragraph demanding an instant slow-mo second read. The novel is written with an interesting conceit: as a long confessional letter safely written by the now-slightly-older protagonist to his non-English-reading mother. Telling her everything. About beauty, hardcore sex, horrible overdoses, devastating grief – everything. I’ll just add: The book opens very abstractly and I mention this in case, like me, it takes you a while to push through the first few chapters and start hitting the more chronologically meaty middle. It still jumps around after, and there are some exotically abstract asides, but settles. Get to the settling! Make the push. An absolutely exquisite novel awaits. 

3. The Skull by Jon Klassen. What % of stories you read with kids have happy endings? Or even watch with kids onscreen? Most, right? Some triumphant bugle-blaring before the parade outside the underwater castle maybe or a chubby three-foot king suddenly getting de-hypnotized and allowing the attractive white couple to marry. Jon Klassen (This is Not My Hat) is one of the few artists sitting pretty firmly in the children’s literature genre while also sitting pretty firmly in the “you have no idea where this is going” genre. I love him for that. Few years ago Jon took a trip up to Alaska for a library reading and thumbed through a fifty-year-old book of folktales before he went on stage. A short tale called “The Skull” stuck with him and, after tossing it around his mind for a year, he reached out to the library and asked if they might find the book since he hadn’t written down the title. They did! “Librarians are really good at that,” he writes in the Author's Note. But! When it was sent back to him it was stretched into something different than he remembered. “I like folktales because that is what is supposed to happen to them,” he writes. “If you read a book once and put it back on the shelf, and a year from now someone asks you how this story went, the same thing will happen: your brain will change it.” The result here is a stunningly crafted 10ish minute read (100 pages but like 28-point font) that is unlike almost anything coming out right now for kids. Otilla is running through the woods – away from an unnamed something – when she stumbles upon a “very big, very old house” where, after knocking loudly, “in a window above the door, she saw a skull looking at her.” The skull walks and talks and it gives her a tour of its house, lets her crash for the night, and then, in a dramatic Tarantino-esque climax, is chased by a headless skeleton who Otilla, uh, pushes off the roof before crushing its bones into dust and burning it into ashes and throwing it down a bottomless pit. Dark! But almost … refreshingly so? The drawings are sideways-sunset entrancing and details are so well thought throughout.

4. The Song Of Significance: A New Manifesto For Teams by Seth Godin. Seth turns 63 in a couple of weeks and he’s evolved into a kind of enlightened Yoda of the business set. His conversations with Tim Ferriss are turning into after-the-music-goes-down by-the-fireplace style dinner chats and his blog posts, which he’s written daily without a day off for decades (and I thought 1000 was a lot!), are part siren-song, part orthogonal-made-you-think thoughts, and part dramatic call-to-action. Just before writing this book, he cobbled together a group of volunteers globally to create the wonderful The Carbon Almanac (10/2022), and when I sent him a letter from my city councilor enthusiastically supporting my pitch to ban gas-powered leaf blowers (inspired by Seth!), he wrote back just so positively, so happily. “This is thrilling," he said. "My friend Dan Pink tells me they've already banned them in DC." Changing the world and seeming content while doing it? He's figured something out. Now: What’s the book about? Significance. In the post-AI world we’re going to need significance – meaning – to inspire, engage, collaborate, and perform at our highest level. Gallup reports that 87% of the global workforce is not engaged. “I don’t know where you work,” Jerry Seinfeld once said. “But I know you hate your job.” Seth surveyed 10,000 people in 90 countries to describe the conditions of the best they ever had and the top four results were “I surprised myself with what I could accomplish”, “I could work independently”, “The team built something important”, and “People treated me with respect.” (“I got paid a lot” was #12 on the list, right between “I traveled” and “I got to tell people what to do.”) He then puts forward a 2x2 with four kinds of work: bottom-left quadrant is “Low Stakes, Low Trust” Impersonal (AI, freelance marketplaces, ‘lowest bidder’ mechanical Turk stuff), top-left quadrant is “High Stakes, Low Trust” Surveillance (certification, verification abound), bottom-right quadrant is “Low Stakes, High Trust” Comfort (familiarity, the village, jam jars at the end of the driveway), and the ultimate top-right quadrant is “High Stakes, High Trust” Significance with work that “creates human value as we connect with and respect the individuals who create it.” Like most of Seth’s books, this one appeals to fractured attention spans (like mine) with 144 riffs spread across 187 pages. They read like blog posts enmeshed under a big bright light pointing the way forward for managers, leaders, and coaches of all stripes. A fantastic read.

5. Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick: “The scary dystopian realities of The Handmaids Tale, 1984 and my own nightmares of an even more segregated, AI-infused-post-pandemic-fear-laden society echoed in my mind as I read this book. And great acts of love and courage that characters, based on real events, performed amidst extreme challenge and tragedy in The Underground Railroad, The Book of Negroes, and The Tattooist of Auschwitz swelled in my heart. The world Celeste Ng creates in her most recent novel doesn’t feel so far from our current reality and the way her vivid characters behave in the face of discrimination and inhumane acts where children are separated from parents is believable, heartbreaking, and inspiring. If you, like me, love themes of what connects us, what could pull us apart, us versus them, unbreakable bonds, courage in the face of tragedy, and heroic acts in desperate times, I think you’ll love this book.” 

6. Sparrow Envy: Field Guide To Birds And Lesser Beasts by J. Drew Lanham. Professor J. Drew Lanham of Clemson University defines birds as “Worship-worthy, feather-bearing, winged beings, most of which fly. With abilities to sing in harmony with themselves, move by the millions in murmuration as a single entity and traverse hemispheres guided by stars, they are what humans would be if they could” and then defines birder as “Me.” A slim volume of bird poetry (like the title track Sparrow Envy) and little bits of artistic field guides around birding and nature, more generally. Playful tone throughout including the Appendices “Nine Rules for the Black Birder” (also a YT video) and “New Names for Plural Birds” which opens with “A Hemorrhage of cardinals / red-staining the backyard / A Consideration, Council / or Congress of crows; / call them anything but murderers, please / A Whir of hummingbirds / A Riff (or Mood) of any bird that’s blue”. A great complement to his wonderful memoir The Home Place (04/2023).

7. Faith, Hope, and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan. Do you remember when Deep Impact and Armageddon hit theaters at the same time and it was kind of hilarious? Same thing with Dante's Peak and Volcano. What’s up with the “two things that kind of look like each other appearing at once” phenomenon? I thought about those movies over the past few months when I noticed that almost every window display suddenly had two new thick books … by music personalities … about creativity … with plain giant circle rings on the cover. I haven’t read Rick Rubin’s yet but this Nick Cave book – it’s a stunner. “This is a book about Nick Cave’s inner life” says the jacket and that’s about as understated as it could be given this thing reads like the ultimately well-crafted podcast. A long, meaty, thoughtful Q&A conducted over many phone calls during the pandemic by expert British journalist Seán O’Hagan, along with Nick Cave, who just has one of the vastest, deepest, tidal-wave minds. I didn’t know much about Nick Cave before reading this book – beyond the fact that I loved “Into My Arms” years ago and occasionally had a “Red Hand File” email from him shared with me – so it was gratifying discovering this book was less memoir (they don’t talk about his upbringing, really) and much more a 65-year steeping philosophy examining our relationship with, amongst other things, creativity, doubt, grief, family, and resilience. Nick has had one of those incredible lives from many perspectives including giant artistic success, deep personal tragedy (including his 15-year-old son falling to his death off a cliff a few years before these conversations), and a truly vast style of living (geographically, relationshippy, religionny, creatively, etc) and, yeah, the way he navigates them is almost … otherworldly? Sort of how George Saunders writes about writing. On the creative impulse: “You have to operate, at least some of the time, in the world of mystery, beneath that great and terrifying cloud of artistic unknowing. The creative impulse to me, is a form of bafflement and often feels dissonant and unsettling. It chips away at your own cherished truths about things and pushes against your own sense of what is acceptable. It’s the guiding force that leads you to where it wants to go.” On certainty: “The more overtly unshakeable someone’s beliefs are, the more diminished they seem to become, because they have stopped questioning, and not-questioning can sometimes be accompanied by an attitude of moral superiority.” On skepticism: “I think of late I’ve grown increasingly impatient with my own skepticism; it feels obtuse and counter-productive, something that’s simply standing in the way of a better-lived life. I feel it would be good for me to get beyond it. I think I would be happier if I stopped window-shopping and just stepped through the door.” On loss: “We are all, at some point in our lives, obliterated by loss. If you haven’t been by now, you will be in time – that’s for sure. And, of course, if you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it. That’s the covenant of life and death, and the terrible beauty of grief.” To me, the book reads like some kind of cousin to Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny, Beautiful Things (10/2020), with emotional depth, and punctuated by incredible stories throughout too, like this one, about small things that stay with you as you’re grieving. “There’s a vegetarian takeaway place in Brighton called Infinity, where I would eat sometimes. I went there the first time I’d gone out in public after Arthur [his 15-year-old son] had died. There was a woman who worked there and I was always friendly with her, just the normal pleasantries, but I liked her. I was standing in the queue and she asked me what I wanted and it felt a little strange because there was no acknowledgement of anything. She treated me like anyone else, matter-of-factly, professionally. She gave me my food and I gave her the money and – ah, sorry, it’s quite hard to talk about this – as she gave me back my change, she squeezed my hand. Purposefully. It was such a quiet act of kindness. The simplest and most articulate of gestures, but, at the same time, it meant more than all that anybody had tried to tell me – you know, because of the failure of language in the face of catastrophe.” Want to stir up emotions you didn’t even know you had? While exploring and wrestling with your own feelings and thoughts about creativity, grief, religion, and philosophy? Well, my friends, look no further than this mesmerizing and heart-stirring gift. 

8. There is no eight! Loot bag time. Okay, I should tell you I bought a kSafe and lock my phone in it every night. That helps me stay offline -- which is good given social media isn't good for kids -- and, of course, lets me read more. Read what? Well, I just revisited my own summer beach reads list -- give it a comb if you're looking for something to slip between the sandals and sunscreen. Btw, if you have time for an absolutely masterful 3000-word essay about reading I'd suggest A.O. Scott's masterful "Why Are We So Afraid Of Reading?". Reading, reading, reading, reading. But good to have breaks! Some podcast mashups I liked recently include Chris Paul on Rich Roll, Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Pete Holmes, Tim Ferriss on Andrew Huberman. I liked the nostalgia bomb of this string of one software product from every year since 1977. And I wanted to say a big thank you to podmaster Rich Roll for sharing 3 Books with his community recently (hi new friends!). A few of our reels together -- like this, this, and this -- have been going extremely viral online. Ravishing Rich makes the algorithms purrrrrr. Lastly, most importantly, you did it -- you made it! -- you're at the end of this 3000-word essay. So congrats! You win the Corn Pop-dusted, cellophane-wrapped prize at the bottom. Which is a video of baby elephants swinging their trunks like turbine fans.

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - May 2023

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Hey everyone,

Last week Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared that “our children have become unknowning participants in a decades-long experiment” before issuing a report showing how social media use doubles mental health challenges and then blaring the bugle for, amongst other things, “tech-free zones”. What’s the best tech-free zone? We all know the answer. Let’s keep cultivating the skill of reading. As I said to Rich Roll last week: Even two pages counts!

Now let’s get to the books,

Neil

1. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For A Human Future At The New Frontier Of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. This is the best book I have read this year. First, I have never read a better knockout blow to Google and Facebook – uppercut-off-the-planet-level -- and the grotesque form of mutant capitalism they spawned. Surveillance capitalism is ‘a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.’ Sound big? It is. The book is very wide-arms-around-everything – enticingly, wondrously, intoxicatingly so. As an example, that ‘new economic order’ line is one of eight definitions offered in the opening pages – right between the arresting 14-line epigraph from W.H. Auden and the 2-page Table of Contents – which, btw, is not to be confused with the detailed six-page Table of Contents from Page 536-Page 541. Here’s the thing: You will want to read it all. All! You’ll want to eat it all. The whole book! You will want to soak this book in through every pore on your skin like some kind of healing cream. It’s that good. That entrancing opening is just a slow-arcing bump for the gentle ten-fingered set that follows. A captivating 18-page Introduction awaits where Zuboff lays out starting grounds (‘The digital realm is overtaking and redefining everything familiar even before we have had a chance to ponder and decide’) and then outlines her premise: “… rights to privacy, knowledge, and application have been usurped by a bold market venture powered by unilateral claims to others’ experience and the knowledge that flows from it. What does this sea change mean for us, for our children, for our democracies, and for the very possibility of a human future in a digital world? This book aims to answer these questions.’ And then … it is on. She goes deep, fast, but with care, without ego, and with everything revealed in a winking-socratic-professor style that leaves you feeling almost intoxicated by learning. Case studies, news headlines, and philosophical questions are braided together wonderfully. She reminds us “until the last few minutes of human history, each life was foretold in blood and geography, sex and kin, rank and religion. I am my mother’s daughter. I am my father’s son. The sense of the human being as an individual emerged gradually over centuries, clawed from this ancient vise” before pushing to say “The new harms we face entail challenges to the sanctity of the individual… including the right to the future tense and the right to sanctuary” and then concluding that “My aim here is to slow down the action in order to enlarge the space for such debate and unmask the tendencies of these new creations as they amplify inequality, intensify social hierarchy, exacerbate exclusion, usurp rights, and strip personal life of whatever it is that makes it personal for you or me. If the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so. We will need to know. We will need to decide. We will need to decide who decides. This is our fight for a human future.” Does it feel like you’ve just read the book? That's just the end of the Introduction! Now you’re on Page 62 and the book is going 20,000 leagues under the sea. But fear not! The murky terrain is covered with a buoyant lightfootedness. The number of doors Zuboff opens – pulling long-kept-in-the-dark documents and tying together loosely-held headlines over decades – is some kind of top-tier detective work. I had a hankering I was going to love the book because I’d heard it referenced by Jenny Odell (How To Do Nothing) and Douglas Rushkoff (Team Human). So I went online and found a used hardcover from an indie bookstore (thank you Biblioasis from Windsor, Ontario!) and then, once I’d spent a couple hours with it and was still breathless, I decided to download it on Libro.FM as well. The size of this book sometimes felt intimidating – I mean, it’s 525 pages and that doesn’t include 166 pages of Notes and Index. But then I’d go on a long late-night walk and fall into an entire chapter on audio – often an hour and forty-five minutes long or something – and could feel like my mind expanding. Zuboff is 71 and a former professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. This is her third book. Her first came out in 1988. Her second in 2002. This one in 2019. She takes fifteen and a half years to write each book. It shows. (By way of comparison, Ryan Holiday has written 11 books since 2010. James Patterson has written 143!) The clarity and power which she navigates our deepening relationship with technology and what technology’s relationship is with us – from eons to centuries to decades ago to today – is sage-like. This is a seeing book – a vital and necessary primer to help us understand where we are and where we go from here. Highly recommended. 

2. Freedom by Sebastian Junger. Let’s say you’re 51 and you just got divorced. You have no kids. You have a brilliant mind – and now it’s spinning a million miles a minute. What do you do? How do you … level set? Take a breath? Reorient yourself in your own life? Well, if you’re Sebastian Junger you spend a year with three friends illegally walking railroad tracks around the States. Doing what? ‘Dodging railroad cops, sleeping under bridges, cooking over fires, and drinking from creeks and rivers…’ says the inside jacket. I was intrigued! I loved Tribe, Junger’s 2016 book that I put on my Covid Reading List. First up, the book is small. Tiny! 145 pages of 14-point font with thick margins. And it opens with this palette-cleansing epigraph: “As for humans, God tests them so they may know they are animals.” Ecclesiastes 3:18 (NIV). Like it? First two sentences are further bait: “The change was immediate. The country opened up west of Harrisburg and suddenly we could drink from streams and build fires without getting caught and sleep pretty much anywhere we wanted.” It takes off quickly from there. There’s a lot to love about this book: the endless tight nerdy digressions on railroad history, the Apache, nomadic culture, and community. I loved geeking out with Junger and almost pictured us smoking in wet clothes on a wet log beside a buggy creek with a slow sun setting behind us. But, ultimately, that highlight is also the lowlight. The digressions kind of are the book. It’s like a handful of journal entries with a buried creek swirling somewhere underground. I guess this makes sense as it’s billed as “a profound rumination on the concept of freedom” so maybe I’m just saying let’s dial back "profound" to "interesting." If you’re new to Sebastian Junger, I’d suggest starting with Tribe. He has a fascinating mind and I’m excited to see where he goes next. 

3. Excellent Advice For Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly. You know how Spotify sends those end-of-year listening reports that everyone geeks out about for like 12 hours? Well, if I had a report like that for “links you’ve texted” I am pretty sure “1000 True Fans” would be in my top three. Kevin’s ability to distill unwieldy and complex things into tiny sentences places him on a high mantle with Seth Godin and Derek Sivers. That’s why I crushed on the KK.org blog post titled “68 Bits Of Advice” that he released on his birthday in 2020. (I even copied his format exactly for my 43 Things I’ve (Almost) Learned As I Turn 43 last year.) The post has since been taken down but he’s made a video if you want the Old Man On A Rocking Chair version – and the top YT comment has them all listed. After you’ve read them, don’t you just want Kevin to be your dad? Well, he kind of … could be? He’s omnipresent. He’s like an apparating Obi-Wan. He just sort of appears and starts telling you what to do. He did like a hundred more podcast conversations for this book (start with this one or this one!) and he blogs constantly and posts constantly and emails constantly. He writes wonderful books and now he has compressed his birthday compressions into the kind of book every writer wishes they wrote. A few of my favorites: “Make others feel they are important; it will make their day and it will make your day.”, “Buy used books. They have the same words as new ones.”, “Most effective remedy for anger is delay.”, “For best results with your children, spend only half the money you think you should, but double the time with them.”, “Unhappiness comes from wanting what others have. Happiness comes from wanting what you have.”, “The rich have money. The wealthy have time. It is easier to become wealthy than rich.” Highly recommended. 

4. Free-Range Kids: Second Edition: How Parents And Teachers Can Let Go And Let Grow by Lenore Skenazy. Way back in 2008 an insanely viral article appeared in the The New York Sun called “Why I Let My 9-Year Old Ride The Subway Alone”. It opened with the following lines: “I left my 9-year-old at Bloomingdale’s (the original one) a couple weeks ago. Last seen, he was in first floor handbags as I sashayed out the door. Bye-bye! Have fun! / And he did. He came home on the subway and bus by himself. / Was I worried? Yes, a tinge. But it didn’t strike me as that daring, either. Isn’t New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It’s not like we’re living in downtown Baghdad.” Who wrote the piece? Lenore Skenazy. Dubbed “America’s Worst Mom” the next day when she was suddenly on the Today Show, Early Show, Fox News, and CNN. Her fame brought acolytes. Her blog Free-Range Kids got big. She met with Jonathan Haidt (NYU professor, author of The Coddling Of The American Mind) and Peter Gray (author of Free to Learn) and started the non-profit Let Grow which is “making it easy, normal, and legal to give kids the independence they need to grow into capable, confident, and happy laws.” So far the organization has helped usher in new laws in six states – dubbed “Reasonable Childhood Independence Law” – which helps spell out allowance for children to be independent outdoors. (Check out their legal work here!) This book reads like a screaming holler from the mountaintops, is written in a fast-casual bloggy style, and is organized into 18 commandments like “Boycott baby knee pads”, “Lock Them Out” and “Trust Strangers.” She writes “At its worst, Free-Range Parenting has been mistaken – deliberately or not – for cavalier bordering on crazy. But at its best, ‘Free Range’ became a rallying cry for all of us eager to believe in our kids, our communities, and our own instincts again.” Lenore concludes each “Commandment” chapter with a ‘baby’, ‘brave’, and ‘leap’ step to practice. Like at the end of Chapter 1 the baby step is “cross the street with your school-age child, without holding hands. Make ‘em look around at the traffic’, brave is ‘Let your little bikers, starting at age six or so, rider around the block a couple times, beyond where you can see them’ and Leap is ‘Drop your third- or fourth-grade child and a friend at an ice cream store with money for sundaes. Pick them up in half an hour.’ Sound easy? Not for me! I’m working on it. And this book is helping.

5. Hummingbirds: A Celebration of Nature’s Jewels by Glenn Bartley and Andy Swash. Hummingbirds evolved 40 million years ago. They can fly forwards, backwards, and upside down. They have the highest metabolic rate of any animal. They zip across the Gulf of Mexico without a pit stop and burn half their body weight in the process. They are the only birds with umami taste receptors. And there are 350 different species of them – making them the second largest bird family after Flycatchers. And, get this, they exist only in the “new world” – from the tip of Alaska to the tip of Patagonia. They want no part of oceans. And nobody’s smuggled a sack of them to New Zealand. Europeans, Asians, Africans, Australians? You’ll have to visit to witness the stunning beauty of Tufted Coquettes, Green-Tailed Sunbirds, Marvelous Spatutails, Ruby Topazes, or White-necked Jacobins. Or, you know, just buy this book. Highly recommended. (Thank you to Dr. Zogaris on Twitter for the suggestion!)

6. The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang. Last year I was at the wonderful Audrey’s Bookstore on Jasper Street in Edmonton and a bookseller took me straight to this book – filed spine-out somewhere near the back. “Favorite book in the store,” he said with a snap. I looked at it. I was expecting a novel. But here was … a collection of essays … about schizophrenia? What the? I mean, I bought it. You should have seen the look in his eye. A piercingness I still recall. I cracked it this month. And, you know, the first two essays were good – for sure -- but the third really sliced me open. Titled “High Functioning” it origami-folds Esmé’s autobiographical descent into her schizoaffective disorder into a ‘from a new vantage point’ story of her presenting the story. She tells us how she went to Yale and Stanford, her parents are Taiwanese immigrants, and how she was born in the US Midwest and raised in California. This book opened up schizophrenia the same way The Reason I Jump, reviewed in my January 2017 book club, opened up autism for me. A truly captivating from-the-inside-looking-out view. Here’s the first few sentences to see if it captures you: “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy. Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure and sense; we divide the interminable days into years, months, and weeks. We hope for ways to corral and control bad fortune, illness, unhappiness, discomfort, and death – all inevitable outcomes that we pretend are anything but. And still, the fight against entropy seems wildly futile in the faces of schizophrenia, which shirks reality in favor of its own internal logic.” 

7. Pete’s a Pizza by William Steig. In my April 2023 book club I wrote about Abel’s Island by William Steig and I got this note back from Lisa who said I could share it with you: “I loved Abel's Island as a kid. I have always had a soft spot for little critters (I have pet rats) and they do have emotions just like us. We have had something of a rough patch lately (my husband's car was totaled, I have a kidney stone that finds my ureter too hospitable to leave- I named him Cuthbert for WWII spy Virginia Hall's prosthetic leg because he has been around long enough to need a name and as an attempt at some gallows humor, and we just had to euthanize one of our rats, Rathaniel, earlier this week) so warm feelings of recognition and nostalgia for books past are appreciated.” I’m sorry Lisa. That sounds completely overwhelming. I love how you named your kidney stone. We all need a laugh. A break! A smile! After looking over my own list of, uh, kind of heavy books this month, maybe we should end with another William Steig book. This is a 60-second read – not a chapter book – and my kids just love it.  It’s about a boy who wants to go outside and "play ball with the guys" but then it starts to rain so his dad cheers him up by pretending to make him into a pizza. That’s it! Watch it on YouTube here. Snippy dialogue is pitch-perfect and it makes for a short and quick read before bed. 

8. There is no eight. Link lootbag time! My conversation with Rich Roll last week, Jonathan Haidt’s leadership on social media continues with “Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health” (just skim the graphs and you’ll ratchet up your kid's cell phone age a few years), check out KS Rhoads doing “nursery rhymes as your favorite band", here’s a captivating video on “Why did kids stop walking to school?”, and a Scientific American article on “Why We Toss And Turn In An Unfamiliar Bed”, too. Oh! And I’m excited for the new Seth Godin book which comes out in three days. 

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - April 2023

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

Hey everyone, 

How was your April? 

I’ve been sort of wobbling between our accelerating world of techno-enabled everything while also carving deep unplugs with the family – and with nature. 

As always, books aren’t just an escape, but time-travel machines, sense-making devices, and entire other places to fully inhabit and live inside for a while. 

These were some of my favorite places to live this month,

Neil

1. What’s Our Problem: A Self-Help Book For Societies by Tim Urban. I first met Tim Urban at a conference in LA six years ago (where he did three different talks). In a simple black T-shirt on a small stage in a stuffy ballroom, he shared an early incantation of this book to a couple hundred tightly packed people. I remember the energy of that standing O afterwards. The kind of energy a room only gets after a speaker touches on something deep and shared. Speaking a million miles a minute it was like Tim became some kind of vessel for the energy of a thousand blinding ideas. Well ... he kept those ideas vesseling for six years and now comes his dizzying, vertiginous, brain-expanding “self-help book for societies” that combines Tim’s ability to compress and distill wisdom (“Human nature plus environment equals behavior”, or his older much-loved “Happiness equals reality minus expectations”) with a lonnng gaze into the soul of our current divisive culture. In Chapter 1 Tim explains the 1000-page book of human history – where each page represents 250 years of our existence. “The Agricultural Revolution starts around page 950 or 960, recorded history gets going at about page 976, and Christianity isn’t born until page 993. Page 1000, which goes from the early 1770s to the early 2020s, contains all of US history.” (Check out this graphic and this astonishing table he created to accompany the idea – two of hundreds in the book that provide constant context and bearings. I agree with Sam Harris who said to Tim on a recent podcast, “You have a way of visually representing information that makes it truly arresting.”) So, if you’re interested in a fresh zoom-out on what’s happening in culture and politics, told in a rare “I-am-well-aware-I’m-walking-on-a-skinny-tightrope” style of objectivity, plus Tim’s sideways-absurd Stinky-Cheese Man-inspired sense of humor, well, this, my friends -- this is the book for you. In Chapter 5 on social justice, Tim asks “What lies at the heart of our rifts? Are they based on fundamental differences or deep misunderstandings? Are people disagreeing about what should be or about what is?” Huge questions! Massive questions! And then he goes and colors them in with images like this one or this one. He wades bravely into prickly pools of cancel culture and social justice fundamentalism and shares what’s happening – and why – from macro-cultural and primitive brain perspectives. And then gets into what happens to societies when people cancel themselves. (Remember Tarantino’s final advice to us: “Don’t censor yourself.”) Tim shows how we’re ideologically training children instead of teaching them critical thinking skills and shows data about how media warps perspectives – forcing us all to think the same. He talks about how “idea supremacy makes society’s big brain dumb” and how “awareness is the gateway to humility.” The book veers more political as it goes on and he goes deep into a graphic he calls The Illiberal Staircase. And, like, I’m summarizing less than two percent of what’s in here. The book is so strong, so nutrient-dense, that it was challenging for me to fit it in my mouth and chew. I printed it out and carried it with me for a couple months – it’s only available in ebook and audio (I know, for shame!) – and I simultaneously listened to entire chapters on Libro.FM … in 0.9x. Yeah, slower than normal speed. No book shame, no book guilt. Plus, it was worth it. Even if you only read half the book, it’s worth it. Even if you only read a chapter or two, it’s worth it. Dizzying, challenging, with lots of small words – and many absolutely massive ideas. This book confirms Tim’s status as the Richard Feynman of our time.

2. The Home Place: Memoir of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham. This book club is such a great community. I got an email from Rumble D. after a recent book club which said “Neil, I have a 3 Books guest suggestion for you. J Drew Lanham is a 2022 MacArthur fellow and an American ornithologist. I loved his book and would love to hear you interview him (maybe while you guys go birding?)” Intrigued, I looked him up and discovered I sort of already knew him – or knew of him, I should say. J. Drew Lanham is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University, he wrote a wonderfully thoughtful and nuanced essay I read last year called "What Do We Do About John James Audubon?", and he starred in a YouTube clip someone sent a while back called "Rules for the Black Birdwatcher". I bought the book immediately and it proceeded to entrance me every night for a week. Sounds like a simple autobiographical-type memoir broken into three parts -- wonderfully named Flock, Fledgling, and Flight -- but the writing, wow, the writing, it's just so vivid, transportive, and meditative. Lanham’s "love affair" with nature is contagious and this book will awaken your inner forest-dweller. Just listen to this paragraph in the opening paragraphs as Drew (J. Drew? Professor Lanham?) describes his home county of Edgefield, South Carolina: “Droughty sands hold onto remnant stands of longleaf pine and stunted turkey oaks in the southern and eastern extremes where the upper coastal plain peters out. In the soggy bottoms of many of the rivers and creeks, rich alluvial soils grow splotchy-barked sycamores and warty hackberries to girths so big that two large men joined hand to hand couldn’t reach around them. A few buttressed bald cypresses draped in Spanish moss sit in tea-stained sloughs. Between the extremes of wet and dry, high and low, even the sticky clay nourishes a surprising variety of hardwoods; slow-growing upland oaks and tight-grained tough-as-nails hickories grow alongside fast-rising tulip poplars and opportunistic sweetgums.” See what I mean? He takes us into his fantastical upbringing on "the home place" with the unforgettable Mamatha, weaves natural lessons into gentle reflections on race and the state of America, and, more than anything, stirs up the rich alluvial soils in the soggy bottoms of our hearts. A masterpiece. 

3. Goodnight, Little Bookstore by Ami Cherrixx, with Illustrations by E.B. Goodale. I remember reading a Monocle ranking of the "Most Liveable Cities" a few years ago and noticing that one of their selection criteria was the number of independent bookstores per person. I love that! And it’s true. Independent bookstores are some kind of ground moss revealing something about the healthy of the local culture and community. And: There aren't enough books recognizing and celebrating this fact. So, for anybody who loves indie bookstores, here's a wonderful visual romp through closing time. I loved all the little things in the drawings -- from the ubiquitous bookstore carts to the ubiquitous bookstore cats. Plus, this sounds weird, but I just love every book I own that in this tall and sturdy "trim size." (I Am A Bunny fans, you know what I'm saying.)

 

4. The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. I flew down to Dallas, Texas recently and sat down with Suzy Batiz for 3 Books. She’s the founder of billion-dollar-valued Poo~Pourri and supernatural, but the endless topline superlatives surrounding her — EY Entrepreneur of the Year! ranked on Forbes Richest Woman list just above Serena Williams! — actually mask the more startling, complex, and inspiring story underneath. Our conversation, which comes out on the exact minute of the next full moon, shares how Suzy navigated a lifetime of poverty, abuse, depression, bankruptcy, and suicide attempts in order to — bit by bit, step by step — manifest a life full of exploration, transformation, and abundance. Books provided key stepping stones on her path. And one of those books was The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. An extremely strong-voiced motivational manifesto to help you – as the cover depicts in the pic above – jump out of the small fishbowl you’re swimming in and into a bigger one. If you’re ready for this book, if you want to make a leap, I have no doubt this book will help. It’s captivating as a magic trick. On the other hand, if you’re content where you are, if you’re feeling good, well, then it might cause some deep itchiness. It did for me. I kept thinking “Yes, yes, I’m ready – time to make the leap!” I became aware of my “upper limit problem” and ready to step into my “zone of genius.” But then, when I’d put the book down, I was like “Wait, no, wait, stop – I’m … good. I’m good. I like my life. I’m happy with the way things are. I don’t want to leap right now. And you can't make me, Gay!" So then I was left to just sort and sift through all those feelings while consciously reflecting and deciding if I am good with where I am. Deeply valuable process. We can all benefit from it. And I’m sure our answers will change many times. I think if you are ready for this voice, for a big leap in your life, well, here it is. Might be consider a cousin book to The War Of Art -- for a slightly more mystical set. Here’s a quick five-minute TV interview with Gay talking about the book to see if it lights you up.

 

5. This Is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor. Translated by Sophie Hughes. Do you remember a couple years ago when we sat down with award-winning children’s book author Yuyi Morales? She told us about her hometown of Veracruz, Mexico. The culture, the weather, the beaches – I wanted to buy a ticket there the next day. So, uh, good news and bad news? Bad news is after reading this book, you might want to go to Veracruz, uh, much less. But the good news is that Fernanda Melchor’s breathtaking entanglement of true-sounding stories, all taking place in and around Veracruz, is completely captivating. She writes in the Author’s Note “More than ever in these image- and recording-obsessed times we distrust words, which seem at once too loud to echo the silence and too muted to express tumultuous existence.” Wow.  These aren’t classic short stories – more like shards of true stories fuzzed-up just enough that they can’t be called non-fiction exactly. But if you’re a fan of short stories, I know you’ll love them. (And if you’re not and want to be maybe listen to David Sedaris tell us about Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, and Joy Williams.) These tales lead us deep into the Veracruz underbelly – black markets, drug scenes, and wet docks with suddenly appearing groups of “nine men, nine black men, soaked to the bone with their arms and legs covered in welts that look like whip marks” who say, in thick Dominican accents, with their arms in the air, in one of the more heartbreaking scenes of the book “Please, tell us we’re in Miami…” In a piece of dangerous investigative journalism, she takes us into a very small town in the Veracruz outskirts where a lynching took place in the 2000s. The piece is complemented by a song locals sing about it, together with her troubles trying to piece what happened from people who didn't want her asking. In a short story that out-Stephen-Kings Stephen King, she takes us into the first date with her first husband who asked her that night at a party, “What’s the most fucked up thing that’s ever happened to you?” and then proceeds to share his answer in a freaky tale of drunk high school friends breaking into a local abandoned house. Put it this way: It was late when I was reading this and I had to drop the book to the floor until morning. If you’re up for an exquisitely written soup of high-wire suspense scenes under a scorching Veracruz sun you can feel on your neck, I highly recommend this book. I’m now going to work backwards through her impressive Bibliography which includes two International Booker Prize-nominations for her first two full-length books. Time to add Hurricane Season and Paradais to the pile.

6. Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary by Ozan Varol. A broad, sweeping, accessible put-in-your-pocket self-help book that pairs Ozan’s whale-like ability to suck up wisdom plankton from our endless sea of overwhelm together with his rocket-scientist brain’s powerful distillation and organization skills. For those feeling sort of dazed, confused, and meandering, this is a helpful kick in the pants. I loved his “Detox” chapter which opens with the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, “There are many things of which a wise man may wish to be ignorant” and then brings us into the obvious-not-obvious wisdom-punishing effects of our social media-addled brains: “The average person spent 145 minutes per day on social media in 2021. The average adult reads 200 to 260 words per minute. The average book is roughly 90,000 words. So if the average adult read books instead of using social media, they would read anywhere from 118 to 153 books a year.” Aspirational, sure, but Ozan is a humble, earnest, and helpful guide who just keeps pulling you forward. In Chapter 4 about becoming “spectacularly you” he asks “What is something that feels like play to you – but work to others?” In Chapter 5 on “discovering your mission” he asks “In your ideal life, what does a Tuesday look like?” and then shares 3 questions to ask when trying life experiments – “What am I testing?”, “What does failure and success look like?”, and “When will the experiment end?” In Chapter 7 he talks about the “power of play” and shares how writers for The Office would work themselves out of ruts by writing plotlines for other popular shows. He weaves all the advice through a field of business nuggety stories and the result is a fun, fast-paced, helpful read. If you liked The Happiness Equation, you’ll like this book. With Ozan’s permission, I’m going to publish the Epilogue from this book in my next Neil.blog email. (If you don’t get that email and want to, sign up here.) 

 

7. On Browsing by Jason Guriel. My friend Doug Miller has trailers full of books. Train trailers. He owns over 300,000 books. He puts a rotating assortment of five to ten thousand of them in his curated mix-mashed brainjam bookstore – Doug Miller Books! -- that everybody in (or visiting!) Toronto should pop in to enjoy. I was browsing Doug’s shop last January when he let me pull out my recorder. What resulted is a real escape-to-the-bookstore chapter of 3 Books that remains one of my favorites. (Join us here.) We talked about how Amazon lets you find what you’re looking for but bookstores help you find what you aren’t looking for. And I think that spirit is why this (very) short pocketbook by Jason Guriel jumped off the shelves to me at Type Books on Queen West (where we had the book launch for Our Book of Awesome.) I had no idea Jason was from Toronto but his detailed portraits of iconic (and iconically dead) stores like Sam the Record Man and Soundscapes brought tears to my eyes. The book was worth it for that alone. A collection of little essays that veer maybe a bit too much into drippy nostalgia-for-cassette-tapes type land but which also articulately brings together reasons for why we love – and should seek to celebrate and maintain – browsing.

8. Brave Irene by William Steig. William Steig is the best children’s book writer most people have never heard of. Children’s literature, really. The man was truly gifted. Yes, he’s probably most famous for writing Shrek! (which the movie was based on) but I think his real gems include Pete’s A Pizza (a quickie must-have for families with kids), Abel’s Island (as good as James and the Giant Peach – and maybe more impressive as Steig does all the drawings himself), and, yes, Brave Irene. You won’t be surprised to hear I was introduced to the book by Doug Miller, 'true-children’s-literature-Jedi', and I can see why he was so proud to sell me this hardcover copy. It’s that good. What's the book about? Well, Irene, 10-or-so-year-old daughter of the duchess's personal dressmaker, braves a winter snowstorm to scramble the duchess's new dress over to her just in time for the swanky par-tay. But the scramble is where the story is -- winds, obstacles, completely submerging herself in snow, wild tobogganing on the dress box, and even losing the dress for a good portion of the story. William Steig wrote books from 1932 - 2003 (not a bad run!) and Brave Irene was his hit of 1986. A classic.
 

9. New Indian Basics: 100 Traditional and Modern Recipes from Arvinda’s Family Kitchen by Arvinda Chauhan and Preena Chauhan. I didn’t grow up with Butter Chicken. Surprising to some! Green daal, yellow daal, aloo gobi, these were the go-to’s from my mom’s kitchen. Special occasions meant rajma chawal, chicken biryani, or maybe aloo roti with homemade chutney on a sunny Sunday morning. Years ago for Christmas, I asked my mom for a cookbook of recipes and the duotanged 8-page book remains one of my most valuable possessions. But, yeah, no Butter Chicken. So that’s where Arvinda and Preena Chauhan come in. The Butter Chicken recipe in here is incredible. And now I'm eager to try more.

10. There is no ten! It’s time for the Link Lootbag. First up, check out this 30-minute talk from Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin which was recorded, let’s see, under 1000 hours ago. Dan Kwan tweeted about it – and I found it gripping, wrote a letter to my federal politicians, and shared it with Leslie -- who shared it with her friends. I know many believe “what technology wants” determines our future and that, when it comes to AI, our best hopes are just to maintain some semblance of steering. But when 50% of AI researchers themselves think there’s a 10% chance AI ends humanity – well, it feels like we have to lean in. Jonathan Haidt shows that social media is a major cause of the mental illness epidemic in teen girls. (Did you see that scary Dove ad?) Rich Roll beautifully teaches us how to Log Off, Turn In, and Tune Up. Sahil Bloom teaches us how to be Time Billionaires. I have loved Brad Montague since the Kid President days and his newsletter "The Enthusiast" is a bit of joy in my inbox. His last one is called “The Theory of Happiness” and he spoke about a great theory from Einstein, The Happiness Equation, and shared this video which is pretty impossible not to smile along to. And, wait ... are you still reading this email more than 3000 words later? You're a raging bibliophile like me. Maybe a raging completist like me! Ragers, either way, me and you. We get each other. Thanks for the hangout and let's geek out about books again next month. Oh, and if you missed last month then here you go...

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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 - March 2023

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

Hey everyone,

Hope you've had a good March.

I deleted all social media apps on my phone this month. I asked someone to change my passwords so I couldn’t bust in, either. Fun experiment. I missed some of the social connection – especially while travelling – but felt my fracturing attention, uh, un-fracturing, and I do notice I’m more content with how I’ve spent my time. Which is usually writing, reading, walking, birding, or, you know, watching the wheels with my kids.

If you want a nudge to try something similar check out my recent chat with Johann Hari for inspiration. Johann even drops his phone in a K-Safe every night!

Btw: I have to say a huge congrats to Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for their epic Oscar sweep. What a win for creativity. We put together an Oscar Encore Edit of my 3 Books chat with them right here.

Okay, now let’s hit the books,

Neil

1. Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris. A torridly-paced high-flying business book that reads like an action movie – all told from a fascinating fly-on-the-wall perspective taking you deep into the trenches during the epic battle between the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo. But that’s just the battle. The book zooms out into the long-term war between these two relatively ancient companies and covers ground like Nintendo’s culture of consistency over 100 years, the story of video games taking off with Atari and then flaming out, fascinating risky strategies like Sega opening their first and only Sega store – complete with huge billboards all over town -- right outside the Bentonville, Arkansas Walmart Home Office after Walmart said they wouldn’t carry the Genesis, and the history of the ‘Sega Scream’ at the end of those “Welcome To The Next Level” commercials. We follow along into Nintendo’s monopolistic >90% market share position with the NES (and hear the fascinating Mario Brothers history) and then track Sega’s emergence through edgy marketing, communication, and business strategies Nintendo would never touch. Over the course of the book, Sega goes from less than 5% market share to over 55% when Mortal Kombat came out. Blake did over 200 interviews and the results are obvious – an unmissable case study on business, strategy, and life. Highly recommended.  

2. Ducks: Two Years In The Oil Sands by Kate Beaton. I’ve been on a lot of flights between Edmonton and Toronto full of men (almost always men) working in the oil sands and heading home to the Maritimes. There’s been a national story in Canada for a long time of societies with high unemployment heading westwards to make money in the lucrative but challenging work offered by the oil sands industry. The picture in this 430-page (!) graphic memoir is different – telling the story of a young woman from Cape Breton leaving her small town behind to work largely behind equipment-supplying desks in the oil sands of northern Alberta for two years. A penetrating tunnel of loneliness offers up a portrait of deep cultural sexism and misogyny – so many truly shocking lines throughout – yet, somehow, all told from an empathetic lens. Brave, unflinching, shocking, not-shocking, with little moments of tenderness in between. You will feel like you’re there. Kudos to Kate for the years and years of work that went into creating this artistic masterpiece. 

3. Dear Black Boy by Martellus Bennett. What happens after you finish off a 10-year NFL career as a Super Bowl winning tight end? Well, if you’re Martellus Bennett, you start The Imagination Agency, a ‘multi-platform storytelling studio’ that creates books, apps, toys, and clothes. One of the first books is this 32-page picture book written as a commencement-speech style rallying cry for young black boys to emerge as leaders. “The low-hanging fruit is what the world prefers you to reach for, but we must climb the tree”, “You deserve to dream the wildest dreams and to chase those dreams the same way you chase a loose ball in the fourth quarter, a running back breaking free down the sideline, or a fly ball in the outfield.” A wonderful expectation-busting dose of inspiration for little ones. (For inspiration for college age folks, try this.)
 

4. The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, A Woman, And The Struggle to Save the Redwoods by Julia Butterfly Hill. A first-person true story of a woman who climbed into a thousand year old tree in the late 90s slated for logging … and lived there for two years until the logging company agreed not to chop it down. Despite the trumpet flourish at the end this isn’t an inspiring story – it’s a devastating one. A portrait of a century-old trust-based organization getting bought out by a stealthy junk bondsman who discovered it’s much more profitable to endlessly break laws – such as those against clear-cutting and replacing old growth forests – and just pay the fines which add up to pennies on the dollar of profits. Limp laws, toothless politicians, and corporate intimidation add up to a crucible of growth for Julia – but at an enormous price. Her descriptions of climbing up and living in the tree are so vivid you’ll feel like you’re in Ewok Village with her. A deep connection to nature – flying squirrels, black bears, lightning strikes and more. For me the book gave a nice escape from “today” and a connection to the larger energy I think many of us need to tap into right now. Highly recommended. 

5. Chip Kidd: Book Two by Chip Kidd with Introductions by Haruki Murakami, Neil Gaiman, and Orhan Pamuk. The most famous book jacket designer in the world is probably Chip Kidd. He did the famous Jurassic Park cover (which turned into the movie poster) as well as lots for authors like David Sedaris, Cormac McCarthy, and Donna Tartt. I didn’t realize this book was a sequel when I bought it and, you know, I don’t like all the covers in here. But I love and respect the thoughtfulness, confidence, and sheer idea-execution that the book walks us through. He shows ideas that flopped, how things were changed, why things were changed. A feast for book nerds. To get a feel for Chip you can check out his TED Talk “Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is” or this interview with the always-on-point Debbie Millman. 

6. Loving What Is: Four questions that can change your life by Bryon Katie. An easy-to-read book describing a four-question process to help you see what’s bothering you and (hopefully) let it go. The four questions are: 1) Is it true?, 2) Can you absolutely know that it’s true?, 3) How do you react when you believe that thought?, and 4) Who would you be without the thought? It sounds lite – almost trivial – but the questions are brought to life with on-stage dialogues and, I think, when asked of yourself, slowly, with the guidance in the book, it really can be helpful and perspective-creating to separate what’s happening from your interpretation of what’s happening and then seeing your interpretation as something you can own and release. Will it always work? Does it apply in every situation? No. But the model is still useful. Some people call this book a method of "doing CBT on yourself" and if you're interested in exploring more therapy-related work check out my interview with Kate the Therapist here.

7. Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty. Do you feel like there’s always been something different about Phil Jackson? I mean, first off, he won 11 NBA championships. More than anyone else! Perhaps that’s why his journey towards a unique practice of leadership is all the more remarkable. In this book he shares how he grew up under deeply religious preachers (“dad preached in the mornings, mom preached at nights”) and then how, as an NBA player, he began his own seeking quest. This is a graceful, peaceful, open-hearted book sharing how he discovered and developed principles from zen philosophy, the Lakota Sioux, and his own unique stirring-together-of-other-things which helped him to create deep egalitarianism and connection within his teams. “More than anything else, what allowed the Bulls to sustain a high level of excellence was the players’ compassion for each other,” he writes. He tells the story of how he had the team circle around Scottie Pippen after he came back after his father died and shower him with love, how he taught players to meditate to quiet their judging minds, and how he created practices to avoid media following the team so they could create their own bubble. All was in service of creating an unbeatable team mind. A unique lens on leadership. 

8. Rodney was a Tortoise by Nan Forler, illustrated by Yong Ling Kang. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick, a book personally chosen and reviewed by Leslie. “This is the perfect book to begin gentle conversations with children about loss, death and grief. As Bernadette processes the death of her pet tortoise the emotive illustrations and subtle lessons about how grief never goes away but lessens with time, is easier experienced with others than alone, and is a universal part of the human experience, present themselves in a perfect tone. As much as we sometimes wish we never had to explore these themes with our children, we inevitably will and this book will soothe the parent’s aching heart while it comforts the child.” 

9. There is no nine! You read all the way to the bottom. Few loot bag links: "Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls" by Jonathan Haidt. George Saunders shares some 'writing worries' in his wonderfully unique Saunders way. Freaky Steve Jobs advice through AI? And I love this photo of Phil Knight watching Lebron James record shot - with his own eyes - while everyone else is on their phone. Oh, and if you're getting at all tempted by my tales of birding lately then download The Merlin Bird ID app.

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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 - February 2023

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

Hey everyone,

It’s getting harder and harder to take a pause, take a breath, and just take inventory of where to point our attention these days.

I’ve felt my own reading slipping as streams and algorithms get louder. But that’s why I value this conversation – a book sharing club – to keep us focused on improving our reading habits.

Also: Big thanks for ten straight weeks of Our Book of Awesome clocking in on international and national bestseller lists. Our little dollop of awesome in the angry frying pan. If you don’t have a copy yet just click here. 

If you know someone who wants to read more books just forward them this note so they can sign up right here. 

Now let’s hit the books,

Neil

1. Breathe In, Breathe Out: Restore Your Health, Reset Your Mind and Find Happiness Through Breathwork by Stuart Sandeman. (L/I/A) Growing up I’d sometimes wake up early and head downstairs to discover a thin bright light under the closed basement door in the dark hallway. I’d tiptoe downstairs to discover my dad, on his shins, pumping his fists into his stomach, while snorting like a horse. “What the … ?” My adolescent brain was, of course, not open to his always-at-the-ready tutelage in the ways of pranayama – the ancient yoga practice of breathwork. (“Prana” means “vital life force” and yama means “to gain control.”) Of course, as often happens, we circle back to wisdom from our parents later. My dad is 77 now and I’m 43 and, well, guess who’s the weird dad doing breathing exercises in the basement before sunrise now? Two things have been helpful for me recently: this extremely accessible book and the Othership breathwork app. The book has already paid for itself many times over but the most life-changing two pages for me were 102-103 where Stuart outlines a 10-second “nose unblocking technique” I wish I knew decades ago. If you’re a “one nostril plugged all day” person like me this is massive. Basically: 1) Take a normal breath in through your nose and out through your nose, 2) Gently pinch your nose while now holding your breath, 3) Tilt your head slowly all four directions – left, right, forwards, backwards, 4) Get back to looking straight and unplug your nose before breathing in a gentle breath. Did it work? If not, do it again. This has, no joke, completely unblocked my nostrils every single time I’ve done it. Stuart, where have you been all my life? Written in incredibly accessible “blog-posty” style prose this is a wonderful come hither to the land of breathwork. Highly recommended.

2. Demian by Herman Hesse. (L/I/A) I was in Boston last year for my school reunion and went out for breakfast with my friend Erik to Trident Books and Café. Both? Yes! You come in, you sit down for some huevos rancheros, you browse books – all in one place. I love how small bookstores force incredible curation, too. 200 million books in the world! Now pick 1000 to sell! Tough job but Trident did it masterfully. Erik and I played the game of “I buy you one of my favorites, you buy me one of your favorites.” I think I got him East of Eden by John Steinbeck –  my favorite book of 2017! – and he bought me this and added the inscription “Enjoy opening this window.” I was excited as I hadn’t read anything by Herman Hesse except Siddhartha (which I loved). This book opened with a heart-pounding scene of ten-year-old Sinclair getting into trouble with the local tough and it builds into an atmospheric “bildungsroman” (fancy phrase for “coming of age” story) tracing the life of Emil Sinclair as he navigates adolescence and attempts to figure himself out. The pacing got slower and slower which made it (to me) a nice before-bed read – but I also struggled to catch all the symbols and allusions flying around. Solid overall but thinking maybe it’s time I get to Steppenwolf. PS. If you’re into bildungsromans, or think you might be, here’s a great list on Goodreads ranking some of the best. How many of the first 25 have you read? I’ve read 11. Lots to go! 

3. Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers. (L/I/A) When I was a little kid I read an interview with Bill Gates and he said something like “Whenever I go to a magazine stand I always buy a magazine I’ve never read before. There’s a lot more to learn in those ones.” I’m paraphrasing but the sentiment stuck with me. Algorithms push, cajole, and classify us into 1s and 0s but there’s nothing like browsing a local bookstore (speaking of which, check out Chapter 99 of 3 Books where I interview self-described bibliomaniac Doug Miller in his own bookstore!) and stumbling upon things that would never have been recommended to you. Like, for example, this raw, scratchily-drawn, emotionally braided-together memoir of high intensity essays telling the story of Ebony as she moves from a trailer park into a black neighborhood outside Baltimore – all somehow told through … hair. Well, not just hair! It’s really about life. And about messages and stories we hear growing up. Themes include ‘acting too white’, casual racism, motherhood, drug abuse, and, in an especially painful essay, boundaries and mental health – when, after her little sister’s hair becomes an object of interest to her softball team she begins twisting and pulling it all out. Doctors, psychiatrists, and pills are called in to help and the final page will just break your heart. Published by Drawn & Quarterly, which has to be the best comics and graphic novel publishing house in the world. Highly recommended.

4. Jacob Two-Two Meets The Hooded Fang by Mordecai Richler. (L/I/A) When I feel my reading pace turn sluggish or my reading attention starting to fracture I turn to page flippers to lasso myself back in. Graphic novels, young adult, and, recently, middle-grade fiction. I found this classic in a Little Free Library and it had the same pumpkin-orange cover I remembered as a kid. Richler wrote it in 1975 and it’s a triumph of children’s literature and storytelling. It opens: “Once there was a boy called Jacob Two-Two. He was two plus two plus two years old. He had two ears and two eyes and two arms and two feet and two shoes.” Turns out he says everything twice because nobody listens to him the first time. After a run-in with a grocer down the street, he’s sentenced to a horrible prison run by the Hooded Fang. This book gets into the thorny parts of the typical nightmares of young kids and has a wonderfully unique “superkid superhero” tone. Btw: If you don’t know Mordecai Richler I highly recommend Barney’s Version. That one's for adults! One of the funniest and fastest-paced books I’ve ever read.
 
5. A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz. (L/I/A) “Funny and fast-paced.” Let’s stick on those four words for a minute. I use them a lot with booksellers. “What kind of book do you like?” “Funny and fast-paced.” I like it as a filter because a) there just aren’t that many books funny and face-paced (and, you know, good), and b) when you hit a good one … well, you can dine out on it for years. To wit: A Fraction Of The Whole. By far the funniest, fastest-paced novel I have ever read. The sprawling, multi-generational, multi-national, multi-layered, multi-structured head trip that is Steve Toltz’s magnificent Booker Prize-nominated 2007 debut. It kind of makes sense that before he wrote it he was a cameraman, telemarketer, security guard, private investigator, English teacher, and screenwriter. Take a taste test to see if it’s for you with the first four sentences: “You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue. My lesson? I have lost my freedom, and found myself in this strange prison, where the trickiest adjustment, other than getting used to not having anything in my pockets and being treated like a dog that pissed in a sacred temple, is the boredom. I can handle the enthusiastic brutality of the guards, the wasted erections, even the suffocating heat.” I love this book so much. Highly recommended. And here's my recent chat with Steve Toltz on the podcast. PS. If you have a favorite “fast-paced and funny” novel, please reply and let me know! 

6. Around the World in 80 Birds by Mike Unwin. Illustrated by Ryuto Miyake. (L/I/A) I never really had grandparents. I mean, three were gone when I showed up and the one who was alive didn’t speak English and lived across an ocean so I saw her maybe five times. I’ve been really lucky in marriage many ways and one is that I’ve inherited a set of “grandparents in law” who’ve shared so much love and wisdom. My wife’s grandmother Donna and I played Scrabble, watched the Blue Jays, and, yes, talked birds. She gave me this book as a Christmas present just eight weeks ago … and died two weeks ago. I read it thinking of her. Flits and swoops into birds you may have heard of around the world – quetzals, kiwis, flamingos, oh my! – together with little behavioral or historical anecdotes that bring them to life. Plus: honestly the best bird illustrations I’ve ever seen. (Sorry Audobon!) I say: Buy it for the pictures! That’s why I laid the book face down in the picture above. Pinch in! That level of stunning art graces every single page. Ryuto, you nailed it. Great book for birders or birders-to-be. Maybe avoid if you’re already “advanced” as this may seem kind of surface for you. Highly recommended. (PS. Little synchronicity with Herman Hesse book above -- the poem / song Beim Shlafeneghen by Herman Hesse was sung by Donna’s niece at her funeral. Wonderful English lyrics here.) 

7. I Am Brown by Ashok Banker. Illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat. (L/I/A) I found myself crying in the library last week after I started flipping through this book after spotting it on display. A wonderful self-affirming book for brown-skinned kids that I wish I had when I was younger. It opens slow and gentle ("I am brown. I am beautiful. I am friendship."), works its way to food ("I eat noodles, tacos, biryani, jhat muri, steak"), tackles stereotypes ("I am a doctor. I am a lawyer. I am an athlete. I am an electrician."), addresses beliefs ("I pray at... a temple, a church, a synagogue, a gurdwara, nowhere"), and does it all in a joyful, bouncing, inclusive, loving way.

8. The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds – Not Crushes – Your Soul by Brad Stulberg. (L/I/A) Nourishing! That’s my one-word summary for this book. Pretty sure I first heard about Brad on The Rich Roll Podcast and he’s got such a gift for distilling research and wisdom into helping us live intentional lives. In the Introduction he shares feedback from coaching clients on burnout, "heroic individualism", and how a newfound diagnosis of OCD helped him write this book where he shares six thoughtful principles of "groundedness": 1) Accept Where You Are To Get You Where You Want To Go, 2) Be Present So You Can Own Your Attention and Energy, 3) Be Patient And You’ll Get There Faster, 4) Embrace Vulnerability to Develop Genuine Strength and Confidence, 5) Build Deep Community, and 6) Move Your Body To Ground Your Mind. Each chapter blossoms into a deeply evidence-based summary of “everything out there” and Brad’s skills as a "success-synthesizer" are on display as he drip-drip-distills so much, so quickly. For example, in his chapter on community, he opens with a nature metaphor, goes deep on loneliness research, quotes Sebastian Junger's (wonderful) book Tribe, shows how this quote connects with self-determination theory (and explains what that is), ties this into work by Jonathan Haidt, jumps into another research study, and then ties all that into takeaways from a 1941 book from Eric Fromm that hit you hard in the chest -- like "To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration, just as physical starvation leads to death." And this all happened in 6 pages. The whole chapter is 31. If you like your self-help highly thoughtful and concentrated, this book is chock full of wisdom for you.

9. Bronzeville Boys and Girls by Gwendolyn Brooks. Illustrated by Faith Ringgold. (L/I/A) Yet another reason to love independent bookstores? Their ability to arrow-point your attention into the dark-tunneled history of your local community. We’re getting so much more global now. And, you know, there’s the risk of leaving behind where we came from in this forever-two-dimensionalizing mélange. I was wandering around downtown Chicago last year when I stumbled on the after-words independent bookstore on East Illinois Street. Right on the front table was a massive display of this children’s book. “BRONZEVILLE!” It just screamed at me. What’s Bronzeville? Well, it’s a Chicago neighborhood that was (in the early 1900s) called the “Black Metropolis” when it became home to thousands fleeing oppression in the south. A massive amount of cultural history took place here like the Pekin Theater (the first black-owned US theater built in 1905) and the Wabash YMCA (known as the first “Black Y” in the US and built in 1911.) Btw that Y is also where Black History Month comes from. What else? Well, as the title of this book suggests, a lot of boys and girls lived here. And Gwendolyn Brooks – the first black Pulitzer Prize winner ever! – distills their pains and pleasures into these emotionally hard-punching little poems. Like one called Otto which reads: “It’s Christmas Day. I did not get / The presents that I hoped for. Yet, / It is not nice to frown or fret. / To frown or fret would not be fair. / My dad must never know I care / It’s hard enough for him to bear.” Or Rudolph Is Tired Of The City: “These buildings are too close to me. / I’d like to PUSH away. / I’d like to live in the country, / And spread my arms all day. / I’d like to spread my breath out, too -- / As farmers’ sons and daughters do. / I’d tend the cows and chickens. / I’d do the other chores. / Then, all the hours left I’d go / A-SPREADING out-of-doors."

10. There is no ten! It’s time for your “you scrolled all the way to the bottom” loot bag of links! Like this slow-mo video of an Osprey taking off, Jeffrey Toobin’s “The Complicated Truth about The National Enquirer”, and “The Tragic Mystery of Teen Anxiety”. What else? Well, Oprah just picked Susan Cain’s Bittersweet as her next Book Club pick (finally!), here's a wonderful Reading List from Let Grow to help “make the case that today’s children are safer, smarter, and stronger than the culture gives them credit for”. Genius-explainer Tim Urban has just put out his epic book What's Our Problem? (which I'm reading now... review to come!). My string on disabling all Alerts and Notifications on my phone, oh did you know TikTok has stricter rules in China, and ... my Most Heartbreaking Discovery Of The Month … who else never knew The Man in the Yellow Hat was a poacher?? 

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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - January 2023

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

Hey everyone,

First off: Thank you! 

Our Book of Awesome came out two months ago and you’ve helped it get off to a roaring start. We’ve clocked onto seven bestseller lists and are now six weeks in a row on The Globe’s International Non-Fiction list. To me this just means the book is slowly finding its people – even despite the confusing cover which is making a lot of people say “Didn’t I read this ten years ago?” If you don’t have a copy, please grab one here. And here’s a little Love page I threw online with loads of interviews, podcasts, and features that have come out from the likes of NPR, Maria Shriver, and The Current. 

Also! I like to kick off Januarys by reminding you I have four email lists: this monthly book club, a lunar podcast update, an every-other-Wednesday bit of inspiration, and, yes, a daily awesome thing delivered every single night at midnight. All my emails remain 100% ad, sponsor, and commercial free as I aim to fill both our lives with good vibes. Click here to adjust your dosage. 

Now let’s get to the books! 

Neil

1. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. (L/I/A) I didn’t start this book club newsletter 75 months ago with the intention of becoming a books evangelist. And yet here we are! 57% of Americans read zero books for pleasure last year. Zero! TikTok is eating our brains and our ability to concentrate on deeper pleasures. I feel it, too. And see it everywhere. I just finished a bunch of Costco book signings and books square footage feels down 50% since before the pandemic. Airport bookstores are telling me they’ve shrunk book displays in favor of candy and phone accoutrements. We have to fight for books! Am I overreacting? Well, maybe, but I did just read Fahrenheit 451 – the mesmerizing 158-page love letter to books and the surprisingly-close-feeling dangers that mass echo chambers pose for society at large. Quick plotline: A book-burning firefighter grows further apart from his Airpods-wearing wife and encounters a curious teenager on his street who jars something loose. Thus begins a frenetic story with our hero skirting the law in favor of finding out what life is like outside the algorithm. Heart-thumping, abstract, evocative, with a pulsing story that ends somewhere near where The Road begins. I had never read it before and recommend this 60th (!) anniversary edition featuring an Introduction from Neil Gaiman. Blow billows on your reading habit. Highly recommended.  

2. How To Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times by Chris Bailey. (L/I/A) I met Chris Bailey six or seven years ago in a hotel lobby in Ottawa and remember seeing him just full-body-lying-down on a fancy purple velvet couch reading a thick hardcover. With the first page ripped out and stuffed inside as the bookmark, a somewhat horrifying habit he's had for years. Chris exuded a bubbly energy and we began a friendship where I’ve been lucky to see him continuously evolve his craft. His first book came out in 2016 and was called The Productivity Project, and it catalogued his ludicrous year testing out every productivity hack he could. (If that style of self-help-searching is up your alley I’d recommend bookmarking this Guardian archive of “This Column Will Change Your Life” by Oliver Burkeman.) Chris followed up that book with Hyperfocus in 2018 -- which has done outstandingly well. And now he returns, post burnout and anxiety attack, with a simple guide to calming your mind. So how do you calm your mind? Well, I might suggest avoiding non-fiction altogether (LOL) and just getting into nature, calling someone who loves you, journaling, or getting into your body with a long walk or a yoga class. Chris says many similar things: get off phones, get outside, lower dopamine, increase analog -- but he leads us there with a great dose of left-brain-scratching research and a, yes, calm tone that makes this a perfect read for right now. A generous offering for the overwhelmed.

3. Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino. (L/I/A) What’s the best way to make things happen? Lean in. That’s it! That’s the secret. Just lean in. Try. Give it a shot. Naval Ravikant says “The real performance enhancing drug is giving a damn.” Might flop, might fail, but at worst … you’ll learn. And, at best, surprises and delights you never would have expected fill you up and serve as nitro to keep going. I leaned into podcasts in the max zone of “everyone doing a podcast” a few years ago. I knew nothing about podcasts! (You can hear firsthand in Chapter 1.) All I knew was I loved books and wanted to use them as some kind of pole to vault up into the world of talking wisdom. My goals for the show were more than realized after Quentin Tarantino came on to chat about his 3 most formative books before his first novel came out – the highly-addictive and wildy fresh novelization of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood which was one of my Best Books of 2021. And now, a few years later, he just put out his first non-fiction book and, get this, even wrote about coming on 3 Books … in the book! (See what he wrote here.) Now, if you’re a 70s movies nerd, this book is basically written just for you. But even if you’re not Tarantino’s writing is rocking and rolling as always and this book will give you the gift of listening to your nerdiest movie nerd pal on an epic late-night geekout. We need more people with this kind of energy in the world. The energy of being far, far away from social media and then just laying eggs of solid gold every now and then. Tarantino has famously and repeatedly said he’ll only make 10 movies which means we have precisely 1 remaining. But as long as he keeps writing books we’ll be enjoying his artistic output for years. Listen to my chat with Quentin Tarantino here. 

4. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. (L/I/A) A touching story about first friendships and first loves. This book has been “almost picked” a few times by 3 Books guests so I picked it up to see what the fuss was about. A vivid tale of sixth grader Jess growing up in rural Virginia in the 1960s between four sisters and his evolving friendship with Leslie who moves next door. I found it a bit stilted but it did explore many themes ahead of its time – gender, death of a child, first affections. And did so in an honest and unblinking way. The ending felt neutered and there were a lot of loose ends I wished were expanded to make this a richer meal but, all in all, if you want to escape to a farm in the 1960s for a couple hours – this does just the trick. Thom Yorke sang “I wish it was the 60s, I wish I could be happy” in "The Bends". Well, we can’t transport our bodies but we can transport our minds. Do you have a favorite 60s or 70s novel you might suggest? Just reply and let me know!

5. I Always Think It’s Forever: A Love Story Set in Paris as Told by An Unreliable but Earnest Narrator by Timothy Goodman. (L/I/A) Timothy Goodman grew up with a single mom in an all-black neighborhood in Ohio in the 1980s. He started painting homes after high school and discovered a love affair with the craft. He moved to New York for design school and has evolved into a suddenly-everywhere “doodle artist” who designs everything from hotel lobbies to garbage trucks to Kevin Durant’s new shoes. His very first book – this one! – comes out in three days and is a graphic memoir sharing an earnest story about millennial love. What’s remarkable about the book is his attention to detail: endlessly-rhyming couplets, pop-pop-pow staccato artistic interruptions, and a fun flip through the heart and mind of an introspective and philosophical expressionist artist. There's a deep sea swirling in this man's beautiful heart. I love Timothy’s work and am excited to share he'll be my next guest on 3 Books on the exact minute of the next full moon. When’s that? Look up to the sky! Subscribe for free on Apple or Spotify. 

6. The Common Good by Robert Reich. (L/I/A) I am revisiting this book as I think about trust in society. How much we’ve lost. How we can get it back. How much we're going to need it in the years to come. Think of a beautifully safe small town where nobody locks their doors. Now imagine the first person who comes through breaking and entering. Pretty easy pickings! Nobody locks their door! Now trust plummets. Arms race erupts. Locks! Security systems! Video cameras! This type of trust evaporation and arms racing has happened everywhere and Robert Reich gives an incredibly lucid portrait of exactly what happened when to get us where we are now. I call it trust, he calls it the common good, but either way, this is a vital read to help understand the world we live in. Highly recommended. (Sidenote: If this area interests you, check out my 2019 SXSW talk “Building Trust In Distrustful Times.” )

7. How To Be Love(d): Simple Truths for Going Easier on Yourself, Embracing Imperfection, & Loving Your Way To A Better Life by Humble The Poet. (L/I/A)  Kanwer Singh, aka Humble the Poet, has had a fascinating path over the past few years. He went from public school teacher to reaching the upper echelons of Internet stardom – amassing millions of followers around inspirational posts on self-love, body acceptance, and social justice – and yet he’s managed to hold onto all of it with a very loose and humble grip. This book continues his gift of sharing with deep vulnerability – check out his book launch post! -- as he continuous to seek and share. I really admire him. Here's a sample quote from Page 164 under the Chapter heading "Be What You Love, Not What Loves You": "Humble The Poet the creative made dope shit, but Humble The Poet with the big social media following got paid to wear clothes, use technology, and attend movie screenings. Creating was nutrition for my soul but being famous paid the bills and was junk food for my ego.... I was no longer doing what I loved, I was doing what made people love me." (PS. Humble’s 3 most formative books are Death Blossoms by Mumia Abu-Jamal, God's Debris by Scott Adams, and The Greatness Guide by Robin Sharma.) 

8. Tiny Buddha's Inner Strength Journal by Lori Deschene. (L/I/A) Way back in the Pleistocene era of blogging, there was a noble brood of 14.4-modem-bauding pilgrims trying our darndest to just, you know, put stuff out there. Social media hadn’t hoovered up all the content yet so blogs like 1000 Awesome Things, Cake Wrecks, Stuff White People Like, Fail Blog, or I Can Has Cheeseburger were where you went for an afternoon laugh or little jolt of inspiration. Most blogs from that era are extinct! Gone the way of the stegosaurus. And yet … some persist. (It’s perhaps like I wrote in You Are Awesome: "What we often think of as evolution 'destroying and replacing' the past is actually 'transcending and including'.") Which blogs are still here? PostSecret, The Bloggess, Marc and Angel, and, yes, Tiny Buddha. Lori Deschene is one of those original mighty bloggers who wins serious props for longevity. Now she's adding this Inner Strength Journal to her offerings. It's a handy toolkit of questions to serve as a little guiding force when you hit the bumps. She writes in the Intro "As someone with a history of PTSD, depression, and bulimia, I've questioned not just my will to go on but my capacity." She then explains that she put together this journal to help manage strong emotions and prioritize self-care. Simple ideas, habits, and exercises to help channel and find inner strength.

9. Gilgamesh by Herbert Mason.  (L/I/A)  Chapter 99 of 3 Books is one of my favorites. Me, you, and a motley crew of book lovers hanging out with the singular Doug Miller inside the piled-to-the-sky used and rare Book Mecca that is Doug Miller Books. Jingling doors, surprise phone calls, floors creaking as people walk through -- it’s an aural escape into cozy bookstore land if you have a long drive or walk coming up I invite you to join us. One of Doug’s pearls of wisdom is that bookstores let us find what we aren’t searching for. The power of browsing, the surprise of the unexpected, that still doesn’t truly exist online. (Maybe we're even getting further away from it?) That’s what led me to finding this $2.99 copy of Gilgamesh -- the four-thousand-plus-year-old epic -- recaptured and distilled fifty years ago by Harvard scholar Herbert Mason. A quick poetic read offering wonderful insight into our oldest elements of storytelling and neverending human struggles around grappling with death, longing for friendship, and our desire for mystical guides. Storytelling has evolved but ones surviving thousands of years are worth checking out.

10. You made it to the end! A few loot bags for you: What's 1 brand you trust? A wonderful conversation between Tim Ferriss and Mark Manson, an interesting take on perspective through the 20th century, the difference between TikTok in the US and China, a wonderful article on the power of play and, oh yeah, who else is excited about EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE landing 11 Oscar nominations? This movie deserves it all. Here's my chat with genius filmmakers Daniels.

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

Click here to join the Book Club email list.

Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - November 2022

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

Hey everyone,

Let's get right to the books!

Neil

1. The Color Purple by Alice Walker. (L/I/A) “Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.” So begins this forty-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that I’ve suddenly been telling all my friends and family to read. Gripping story tackling endless taboos with an incredible (and incredibly flippable) structure of … letters. That’s it. That's the whole book. Letters! (There’s apparently a term for this: Epistolary). The book is letters from from Celie to God, letters from Celie to her sister Nettie, and letters from Nettie back to Celie. Alice Walker’s ability to disappear behind these characters, which grow and change in front of you, is just remarkable. And the fact the book is forty years old and tackles issues like sexuality, abuse, masturbation, incest, domestic violence, and, well… it goes on. A truly searing piece of writing and activism. I see why Bryan Stevenson just named it one of his 3 most formative books in our chat that just dropped. I’m grateful he had me read it to prepare for our interview and now I’ll pay it forward to you. (PS. Bryan’s other two formative books were Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky and you can listen to him opening them up on Apple or Spotify. Here’s a bunch of quotes from the show to get you in the mood.)

2. Liberation Day: Stories by George Saunders. (L/I/A) The opening short story is a punch-you-in-the-nose 67-page first-person tale from a middle-aged man whose memory has been wiped and he’s now (happily?) reprogrammed into a type of wall entertainment in a rich family’s home. And, remarkably, his voice sounds exactly like a reprogrammed-wall-art human should sound. (“Mr. U climbs a stepladder to pop into each of our mouths a lozenge. Jean, the maid, comes in with three water sponges on sticks, with which she moistens our lips, and then it is Dinner, and she Feeds us by attaching our Personal Feed Tubes to the tri-headed Master Feed Tube coming out of her large jar of Dining Mélange.”) George Saunders is a puppeteer. And a master distiller who works sentences down to tight, spare, well-oiled parts. The result is every-word-in-its-right-place stories that jostle and jar. Now, sure, I do find myself thinking “What the hell is going on here?” a half dozen times in the first few pages of every story. But I know I’m in the hands of a master who knows exactly when I’m thinking “What the hell is going on here?”, in fact makes me think “What the hell is going on here?”, and then lures me forward from every single "What the hell is going on here?" moment with precisely the right bread crumb at precisely the right time. Net net: we slalom through together. And it is great fun. Khalid Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, says “Saunders makes you feel like you are reading fiction for the first time.” I absolutely agree. High-wire daredevil writing at its finest. Pulls off that tough combo of literary and accessible. Highly recommended.

3. Guy Stuff: The Body Book For Boys by Cara Natterson. (L/I/A) And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie Pick: “There’s a dated memo to parents that they must look for this perfect moment to have 'the conversation' with their child. I’d like to burn that memo. The new memo is that there are small, little, imperfect moments alllllll the time to talk about bodies, feelings, consent, sex, puberty, gender, relationships (and the list goes on) with your child. Some will randomly present themselves (“Did you see that Auntie Susie is pregnant?” “Time to wash your penis!” “Please ask your sister if she wants you to sit on her lap.”) and others can be brought up through books like this one. I have planted Guy Stuff: The Body Book for Boys on the coffee table for our kids to pick up and flip through. The illustrations show boys going through bodily changes and it provokes questions about everything from shapes and sizes, to underwear, to sports safety, to feelings. I’ve been working hard to be around when they “stumble upon” this book, keeping my affect calm and neutral, asking questions and letting their curiosities direct our conversations. Also available is The Care & Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls (one for younger girls and one for older girls). May it start many small conversations between you and your child.”

4. The Future is Analog: How to Create A More Human World by David Sax. (L/I/A) Does everybody agree virtual school sucked? You could feel the social bellums of our kids' brains drying and flaking off as they stared into flickering laptops on kitchen tables. These days when I walk by a playground and see kids playing mindless games, inventing new languages, and running around like hyenas – well, I love it. The future, indeed, is analog. We’re human. We’re not getting rid of these brains anytime soon and evolutionary theory says you know what? We need to be around each other. That’s what I think, anyway. Less screens! Less virtual offices! More IRL. But don’t take it from me. David Sax over here is an award-winning journalist who’s interviewed and investigated our ‘digital versus analog’ selves across seven dimensions: Work, School, Commerce, The City, Culture, Conversation, and Soul. He returns with a follow-up manifesto to his wonderful The Revenge Of Analog that truly felt like the fresh air I needed. For a nice overview, he just wrote a feature piece in The Globe and Mail called "All screens, no touch".

5. Our Book of Awesome by Neil Pasricha. (L/I/A) *cough* Have you heard I have a new book coming out? In just 10 days? I'll leave this review to Jenny Lawson and all the folks writing early reviews on Goodreads. (Starting to get some love on Bookstagram and BookTok too, if you swing that way.)

6. Rare Birds: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man Who Brought It Back from Extinction by Elizabeth Gehrman. (L/I/A) Sometimes when I travel I use the eBird app to find local birders to go birding with. I keep a pair of binoculars in my suitcase and add new birds I see to my Life List. (There are about 10,000 bird species in the world which means I only have about 9700 to go!) Shoutout to Dave who drove me around Nevada looking for Burrowing Owls last year, Jodi who I stood on the edge of a muddy lake with in northern Alberta watching thousands of migrating American Avocets, and Graham who just two weeks ago told me the story of the Bermuda Petrel. Graham told me he’s really into pelagic birding. I had no idea what that meant but turns out it just means “getting on a boat and looking for birds that live permanently on the water”. Lot of birds like that! Puffins, for instance. Just use land for nesting and then back to their rolling human-free paradise. The Bermuda Petrel is an interesting nocturnal squawking seabird that ‘haunted’ explorers for hundreds of years. When Europeans finally settled on Bermuda they released a bunch of pigs, stole all the birds eggs, and rendered the entire species extinct…. in like a decade. OR DID THEY!? Three hundred years later, in 1951, on a tiny set of craggy rocks jutting out from the water, 15-year-old David Wingate was in a boat that spotted a few pairs of Bermuda Petrels. Like that was all of them in the entire world. He then spent his life, the next seventy years, nurturing these birds back from the brink. “He was bawling when I went out with him,” said Graham. “We counted 183 of the birds and he’d never seen that many before.” This book gives a deep journalistic portrait of David, the birds, and, higher level, the ability our notoriously steamrolling-everything species to (perhaps) undo some of the damage we’ve done. Great for environmentalists, birders, and, you know, people who love earth.

7. The Penguin Classics Book by Henry Eliot (and 100s of others). (L/I/A) My family had two bookshelves. One was just the Encyclopedia Brittanica. The other was a three-foot tall shelf in the upstairs hallway with my mom’s health, self-help, and inspirational books – plus some Sidney Sheldon and Danielle Steele. That was it. Pretty barren except on library days. When I was nineteen I visited my friend Claire’s house in downtown Toronto. I took the train in from the burbs and still remember walking in her front door and being just staggered by the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering every single wall of their front room. And almost all the books were the same color. Orange! Orange everywhere. Penguin Classics had spread like slime. “It is the design of this Library to provide English-speaking readers with new versions of the finest and most enduring of the foreign classics, ancient, medieval and modern,” says the classic opening page of the book – said in a bit of a snooty brunch-on-Fifth kinda voice. But it’s just because they took the job seriously. And it paid off. Chopped into four high-level sections – The Ancient World, The Middle Ages, Early Modern Europe, and The Industrial Age -- the book turns into a history lesson told entirely through books. For example, zooming into Ancient India (one of 19 sub-sections) I learned about the 12th-19th century BCE-published collected “Roots of Yoga” Penguin classic which collects and translates all the Hindu, Tantric, Buddhist, and Jain yoga traditions from original sources. And the collected plays and poems of Kālidāsa, the 5th century BCE writer thought to be the best classical Sanskrit writer of all time. On one hand: This is just a sales catalog to all the Penguin Classics. On another: It’s a booklovers ultimate geek-out that never gets old. On yet another: It takes a ripe swing at trying to annex and index our collected wisdom over the past 5000 years. Worth grabbing for any of those reasons!

8. The Barnabus Project by The Fan Brothers. (L/I/A) I put The Fan Brothers (Terry Fan and Eric Fan) in the category of “Geniuses More People Should Know About.” Look at their catalog! Transfixing and stunningly emotive work that elevates the entire “Picture Book” category a few notches. The Barnabus Project may be their best. On a Main Street downtown is a pet store called Perfect Pets with fuzzy, big-eyed, “fully trained” pets sitting in boxes ready to be bought. The perfect pets were, of course, created in an underground laboratory – with our typically-invisible global supply chain nicely compressed to just underneath the pet store here – and that basement laboratory has, you know, errors. Mistakes. Weird lab results that have created its own Island Of Misfit Toys. Or Basement of Misfit Toys, I guess. The book tells the story of Barnaby, a bonsai half-mouse-half-elephant living under a glass bell jar on a shelf with other errors – all tended to by ‘Green Rubber Suits’. Pip the Cockroach tells Barnaby about life outside the lab and that cues a dramatic escape that is visually stunning – take a look! – and full of little lessons along the way. A truly stunning piece of art. I also highly recommend their books The Scarecrow, Ocean Meets Sky, and (with astronaut Chris Hadfield), The Darkest Dark. May the world bring us more from The Fan Brothers! Highly recommended.

9. There is no nine! You're in the loot bag now. Where to begin? Well, it was my bird-loving dream to guest on this episode of The Warblers podcast by Birds Canada. I really loved this conversation between Rich Roll and Casey Neistat covering (amongst many other topics) digital brain-fry and the joy of making 4-view YT videos. I've been enjoying Susan Cain's new newsletter geared towards those who prize 'quiet over hubbub, depth over superficiality, and sensitivity over cool.' You can sign up right here. A wonderful set of graphs to help make sure you're prioritizing things right. "What's one book you loved as a kid that still sits on your shelf today?" And, lastly: If you're in Toronto on December 12th come hang out with me at Rotman!

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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 2022

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

Hey everyone,

The goal in school was always finishing books. Get to the end! Get up and tell us about it! But reading like this often prevents further reading. I prefer: Quit more to read more. Stop reading any book you aren’t enjoying and swap it for something that gets you going. Your reading rate will skyrocket. And, when it slows? Quit more to read more again. No book shame, no book guilt, and never any pressure to finish. Just keep moving.

Also, some news: I get emails all the time asking for signed copies of my books. And now I’m pleased to share that my local independent bookstore TYPE in Toronto is now stocking signed copies of You Are Awesome, The Happiness Equation, and Two-Minute Mornings. They're happy to mail them to you anywhere in the world. Just click those links for the title you'd like.

Books are the single greatest form of compressed wisdom we’ve ever created. They take us places otherwise inaccessible and offer us springboards into wider emotions, deeper wisdom, and more intentional lives.

Let’s keep turning the page together.

Here are my book recos this month,

Neil

1. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson. (L/I/A) When I launched 3 Books back in 2018 I got the phone number 1-833-READ-A-LOT and asked listeners to call me. Ask a question, share a formative book, request a guest, leave a comment, whatever! It’s been a wonderful way to hear from you and I play a voicemail at the end of every podcast (and if I play yours I sign and send you a book, too!). Now a couple years ago I got a voicemail from Austin Wong who suggested I read Just Mercy and interview Bryan Stevenson. I’d never heard of it. I didn’t understand what the title meant. But now I can’t stop thinking about it. And talking about it. And telling everyone about it. Just Mercy tells the incredible life story of Bryan Stevenson, the (now) 62-year-old Harvard law school grad who began difficult and often dangerous work defending Death Row prisoners in Alabama. Often wrongfully convicted. Often children condemned to die in prison when they were just 13 or 14. The book’s structure is mesmerizing itself: Bryan’s story braided with shorter cases, longer cases, chapters on US racial and mental health history, and even poems from prisoners. It’s gripping, entrancing, hold-your-breath reading. Every chapter swerves a different way. The book came out in 2014 and the paperback I bought a few months ago says “43rd printing” inside. (That explains the 144,991 five-star reviews on Goodreads.) This book will both deeply inform your understanding of US racial, legal, and criminal history while also move you to tears with edge-of-your-seat courtroom drama and a biography of a guy multiple blurbers on the inside cover call "America's Mandela." Thank you, Austin, for turning me onto Bryan’s work. My interview with Bryan will come out next month, too. Highly recommended.

2. The Carbon Almanac. Foreword by Seth Godin. (L/I/A) “I’m interested in scaling trust,” Seth Godin told us back in Chapter 3 of 3 Books. This book feels like an ultimate manifestation of the trust he’s built for decades. Seth is a giver. I’ve heard him called an ubermensch by multiple people, multiple times. With this incredible offering Seth managed to coalesce a team of over 300 global volunteers – purpose over profit! – to research, write, and shape an almanac about carbon. What’s an almanac? Think of it like a giant flip-to-any-page treasury of ruthlessly fact-checked information about climate change presented in a way that’s both meaty and accessible. Informationally rich micro-chapters like “What Is Carbon?”, “ “The 5 Scenarios Outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” and “Countries Leading Climate Change Action” are interspersed with sections like “The Climate Cost of Gas-Powered Leaf Blowers” (never buy a leaf blower!), “The Exxon Climate Memo from 1982”, and “How Roundabouts Help Lower Emissions” (a single roundabout in a city of 100,000 people saves 75,708 liters of gas a year!). Plus a liberal buttering of quotes and cartoons. Every section is indexed with a 3-digit number with an invitation to check their work and sources by plugging the number into their website. It helped me color in much of my vague perceptions about climate change with a lot more actual knowledge. I hope it becomes a fixture in classrooms and coffee tables to provoke conversation and action. An amazing job by Seth and his team. Visit www.thecarbonalmanac.org to learn more or get a copy.

3. Bad Vibes Only: Essays by Nora McInerny. (L/I/A) A warm embracing glow emanates from Nora McInerny, the big-brained, every-feeling-under-the-sun creative wonder who independently puts out the stunningly produced story-driven mental-health exploring podcast Terrible, Thanks For Asking, while also giving speeches (like the 5,034,176-viewed TED Talk “We don’t "move on" from grief. We forward with it), while also writing deeply accessible and funny books exploring knottier issues in life for the millennial-leaning set, while also, you know, raising a big family of kids and animals down in Arizona. If you feel your attention fracturing, spend a lot of your life online, and find yourself navigating mental health challenges – who doesn’t? – then these short, tight, fast-paced essays are just perfect. On an essay about finding a therapist she writes: “The website for Psychology Today functions just like Match.com, letting you sort by geographic range, specialties, and accepted insurance. For the shallower among us, you can just choose according to headshots, the way nature intended.” On navigating moral goodness in a complex world she writes: “My hybrid saves hundreds of gallons of fossil fuels every year while also reassuring me that I’m a Good Person. However, the batteries are toxic to dispose of and are created with rare earth metals that are obtained either through dangerous mining practices, warfare, or maybe just scraping the bottom of our ocean? I was served an ad for a service that uses artificial intelligence…. to write advertisements. This makes me want to curl up in a ball and die, but what if it also makes comprehensible copywriting available to small businesses…? My Shih Tzu is on anti-depressants that have helped her come out from under the bed and actually interact with us… and some actual human people can’t afford access to mental healthcare.” A heart open, wide-armed navigation of anxiety, depression, and our endless cultural gray with warmth, humor, and love. Reading this book is like having coffee with a smart, chatty, funny friend. (PS. You can also listen to me on Nora’s podcast or Nora on mine.)

4. The Serious Goose by Jimmy Kimmel. (L/I/A) And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick. Over to my lovely wife: “Nothing feels better than a good laugh, other than maybe hearing your kids have a good laugh. The Serious Goose pretty much guarantees it. I picked this book up with our four-year-old a few weeks ago and it has instantly become a family favourite. Appeals to kids as young as two and makes everyone laugh out loud. There’s a bit of a weird ending about their attorneys coming after you for making the goose laugh but we just skip that and celebrate that we turned the serious goose into a silly goose. A great extension is to play a game we now call The Serious Goose by sternly saying to your kids, “Now, just remember, there are only serious gooses allowed in this house. No silly gooses whatsoever! No laughing, no smiling, no having fun allowed! No exceptions!” Your kids will undoubtedly start smiling and laughing and you can dramatically chase them around and roughhouse with them saying, “Oh no!!! You just turned into a silly goose! I thought this house only had serious gooses in it!! What is going on!! I told you not to laugh!!”! Between the book and the game, you and your kids are bound to have some good laughs with this one!”

5. Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control by Ryan Holiday. (L/I/A) According to The American Time-Use Survey, 57% of Americans read zero books last year. Zero! That’s the highest the number’s ever been. What do we need? Reading evangelists. People who speak to digital worlds about the richness, depth, and wisdom offered in the printed world. Ryan Holiday is a Book Evangelist: he has a monthly book club, he owns indie bookshop The Painted Porch in Bastrop, Texas, and he seems to write a new book every year. Sometimes even two a year! Discipline is Destiny is his newest and it contains a deep slap of wisdom even in the Table Of Contents alone. Each opens into a short few pages that weaves together parables of people ranging from Stoic philosophers to athletes like Lou Gehrig to writers like Joyce Carol Oates. I wish the book had hyperlinks built in because there were so many people or stories I immediately wanted to read about in more detail. The emphasis on discipline is wonderful if you need a kick but if you’re already revving in fifth gear too much (*cough*) you might find it a bit stressful. So for me this is a great book to shake into the soup when I’m struggling to get going and a book to keep on the spice rack when I’m looking to chill or wind down. If you’re new to Ryan’s writing this is a great start. I’d put it up there with The Daily Stoic, which is my favorite of his. (Here are links – ping! ping! -- to getting both of those signed from his own bookstore.) If you want an entry into his writing, I recommend the advice articles he writes on his birthday like this one or this one.

6. Here Goes Nothing: A Novel by Steve Toltz. (L/I/A) Big statement coming! Here it is: My favorite novel is A Fraction Of The Whole by Steve Toltz. Number one overall! I walked into TYPE Bookstore before my wedding looking for a great book to take on my honeymoon. Kalpna, the wonderful bookseller, spent an hour with me picking books off the shelf and I kept reading the first five pages till I found the winner. A Fraction of the Whole had everything: fast-paced, funny, wild characters, a torpedo-spinning plot, with sprinkles of sideways wisdom throughout. Definitely the fastest 600 page novel I’ve read and I can’t recommend it enough. That 2008 book was the debut novel of Australian polymath Steve Toltz and was Shortlisted for the Man Booker. I hope you read it! Here Goes Nothing is Steve’s third novel. I will say up front the plot doesn’t hold together as well: a possibly-dying man convinces a young couple to rent him a room in exchange for his life savings before murdering the husband, who recounts the whole story from the afterlife. But I will also say: I believe it’s worth reading Steve Toltz for the sentences alone. Shocking, unafraid, and often time-freezing – there are wild scenes with Zen koan-like phrases just lobbed in out of nowhere. Hard to share some so out of context but, well, here goes nothing: “Being called names has never particularly bothered me. I find insults amusing if they aren’t true, and a free life lesson if they are.”, “Is there an activity more satisfying that furiously throwing somebody else’s things into a suitcase?”, or “I disliked when anyone tried to give me knowledge non-consensually; I wanted to protect my ignorance, the most underrated of the human rights.” I find Steve’s voice a true original and I know I’ll be buying every book he writes.

7. Voicing Change: Inspiration and Timeless Wisdom From The Rich Roll Podcast by Rich Roll. Only by engaging in deep and nuanced conversations can we hope to move ourselves and each other into a higher awareness and more generous way of living. I’m not there yet but one of my guides on getting there is Rich Roll. The Rich Roll Podcast is wonderful. I would go so far as to say I think Rich is the best interviewer on the planet. He gently pulls stories and a-has from guests in long threads and offers ‘wisdom divorced from the vicissitudes of the daily news cycle.’ Plus, his almost languid west coast drawl seems to smooth over the piercing intelligence and word-juggling mastery that might otherwise intimidate. Through Rich’s lens Matthew McConaughey is “a Texan on a four-dimensional vision quest, pursuing life in accordance with a homespun code”, Julie Piatt is “a doyenne of all things non-dairy”, Erin Brockovich is “a powerful reminder of the indelible influence of the individual to create positive change and awaken a movement”, and Ross Edgley is “a living, breathing Aquaman with the trident to prove it.” If you don’t have time to listen to a year or two of Rich Roll Podcast episodes then reading these distilled and curated excerpts – each with Rich’s gorgeous table-setting before – is a more than functional alternative. Like everything Rich makes it’s aesthetically on point, too. This self-published book arrives Macbook-style in a perfect rectangular box (though not needlessly dyed and laminated, of course) and opens into a coffee table book for curiosity junkies. Ultimately we’re all learning animals and this is a perfect holiday gift for the seekers in your life.

8. You're at the end! Where else can I point you? Well, my friend Mel Robbins just started a podcast you should check out: The Mel Robbins Podcast. Her ability to connect with listeners in such a intimate way is unbelievable. Subscribe on Apple or Spotify. (You can read what I think of Mel here or listen to us on 3 Books here.) I also liked this study "The Pen is Mightier Than The Keyboard" and, if you haven't had enough of me yet, you can hear my Simple Rules for Happiness right here with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project. That should do! But one last reminder: Keep looking for awe.

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

Click here to join the Book Club email list.

Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - September 2022

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

Hey everyone,

Another pack of fresh book recommendations for you. Missed last month? Here you go. Know other book lovers who might like this? Here you go.

To the pages!

Neil

1. How to Develop Self-Confidence and Influence People by Public Speaking by Dale Carnegie. (L/I/A) I’ll come right out and say that if you speak publicly in any way you need to grab this 96-year-old classic. Warren Buffet was in the middle of his Masters at Columbia when he spotted an ad in the paper for the Carnegie Public Speaking course. He paid the hundred bucks and to this day calls it the best investment he’s ever made. Pretty big claim from a guy who own $100B of Apple? “I don’t have my diploma from the University of Nebraska hanging on my office wall and I don’t have my diploma from Columbia up there either – but I do have my Dale Carnegie graduation certificate proudly displayed,” he says. It’s easy to see why. Carnegie's thoughts on public speaking are priceless. He wrote his first three books ever on the topic and delivers great messages with folksy charm. On Page 54 Carnegie teaches you how to end with an appeal for action, on Page 76 he teaches you how to write your speech down as a series of pictures to memorize, on Page 90 he explains the importance of writing out a pre-speech ritual, on Page 119 he talks about the benefits of standing versus sitting. I take so many elements from this book when I craft a speech and as live events return with a bang – thank goodness! we’re social apes! – I find myself revisiting this classic to see what I can improve. There's always a lot. Highly recommended.

2. My Side Of The Mountain by Jean Craighead George. (L/I/A) Jean Craighead George grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a family of naturalists who spent a lot of time in the bush. Her first pet was a turkey vulture! Hope it didn't puke on her mom's front rug. (Anyone else kind of love that the primary defence of turkey vultures is, no joke, vomiting?) Jean's dad taught her how to make fires and fish hooks and find edible plants and even climb trees to study baby owls. Owlets, I should say. (Distracting sidenote! Here are 1 2 3 owlet GIFs!) Her brothers even ended up becoming two of North America’s first falconers but, thankfully for us here in the next century, Jean carved her own path and become a writer. She wrote over a hundred books! Alie Ward, host of top science-pod Ologies, tipped me off to this 1959 classic and I found myself entranced by it. It’s a bit clinical but you really will feel like a 12-year-old boy who has run away from home to live alone in the forest. He climbs a tree to snatch a Peregrine Falcon chick and trains it to hunt. He traps, gets attacked, and then befriends a weasel that he calls The Baron. He makes deerskin clothing and preserves grains and tubers. It goes on and on and on. But it's written for kids! So it's super complicated but... for kids! A great way to learn. I like this New York Times book review from Sunday, September 13, 1959 which calls it “a delightful flight from civilization, written with real feeling for the woods.” If you want a delightful flight from civilization, if you want to slice your carving knife through our sometimes-suffocating techno-wrap, well then I have just the book for you. Run away to the woods with this one.

3. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861 by Henry David Thoreau. (L/I/A) In that review I just mentioned they call Jean Craighead George a “Third Avenue Thoreau” which is a nice little moniker for her rugged individualism. It was Austin Kleon, a man who draws on doodling to design and dream, who asked me to pick up Thoreau’s journals. A wonderful phone book to leave beside your bed for anxiety-releasing late-night mental walks beside a master of observation. You can literally flip to any page for a tiny little nature microdose. I'll do it right now. Two actual real-time flips? Here we go. Fliiiiiiip. March 28, 1851: "My Aunt Maria asked me to read the life of Dr. Chalmers, which however I did not promise to do. Yesterday, Sunday, she was heard ... shouting to my Aunt Jane, who is deaf, 'Think of it! He stood half an hour to-day to hear the frogs croak, and he wouldn't read the life of Chalmers." Fliiiiip. October 10, 1855: "You now see in sprout-lands young scarlet oaks of every degree of brightness from green to dark scarlet. It is a beautifully formed leaf, with its broad, free, open sinuses, --- worthy to be copied in sculpture." This book scrubs mental plaque with every page.

4. Good Inside by Dr. Becky Kennedy. (L/I/A) And now it's time for this month's Leslie's Pick -- a book recommended by my wife Leslie: "The underlying thesis of Dr. Becky Kennedy’s parenting philosophy is that we are all -- all parents, all kids -- good inside! In this new book, Dr. Becky describes 10 parenting principles in a way that is engaging, easy-to-read, logical, empathetic, and to-the-point. I find myself turning my light back on to keep reading! Two of my favourite ideas from the book are the principles two things are true and know your job. Two things are true is a reminder that both your perspective and your child’s perspective are true; it means that you can be a fun parent and also a sturdy parent, that you can take care of your child and also your self, and that you can have firm boundaries and be very loving, and on and on. Know your job is the idea that systems work better when we all know our jobs. She describes that it is a parent’s job to empathize, validate, and set boundaries and that it is a child’s job to feel the whole range of emotions. If we use our “good” to support their “good” then they will grow into adults able to regulate their emotions and thrive as adults. Definitely a new favourite!”

5. Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff. (L/I/A) What was the last book you read cover-to-cover in one sitting? This is mine. A loud whirring engine powers this book and to me it demonstrates why Douglas Rushkoff might be the world’s leading practitioner of the rant -- as an art form. I listed his Team Human in my Best Books of 2021 and he was kind enough to join me on 3 Books to talk divisive duality and designer deaths. Now he’s back with a blazing manifesto that opens in a luxe desert hotel where he’s giving a lecture to a roomful of billionaires. He shares how they veer the conversation towards one of security, protection, and bunker-management. Douglas takes this anecdote and peels it open to talk about trends towards distrust, alienation, surveillance, wealth inequality, and more. If you walk a lot of urban streets or talk to a lot of strangers you know, you can feel, that all is not well. Rising anxiety, depression, loneliness, addiction, and suicide are just some of what ails us these days. Douglas emerges a Robin Hood-type with his arrow aimed straight into the heart of Big Tech. (Is there a heart in the center of Big Tech?) The man is sharp. Killer sharp. Reading his book feels like watching twirling gymnastics over a fire pit. He braids blistering screeds with scientific studies and takeaways from books like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. A couple out of context quotes? How about this one: "Studies show the more power a person has the less ‘motor resonance’ or mirroring they do of others.” Or this: "… better for the algorithms streaming us the picture of the world we want to see, uncorrupted by imagery of what’s really happening out there. And if it does come through, just swipe left and the algorithms will know never to interrupt your dream state with such real news again.” If you enjoyed How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell you’ll love this one. Highly recommended.

6. The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack. (L/I/A) Were you one of those kids who felt just stunned when you first started to comprehend the size and vastness of the universe? I feel like the “Where are we? What are we doing here? What does it all mean?” questions hit a lot of us when we’re eight, nine, ten years old. Everyone responds differently, of course. If you’re 8-year-old Alvy Singer in Annie Hall you might respond like he does in this hilarious 56-second clip. Or, you know, maybe you just sort of shove it away. Bury it! Maybe ascribe to a belief system that calms or sets things down in a digestible order. Maybe you turn a bit nihilistic … or fatalistic … or optimistic? Or … maybe you just point your curiosity at these questions your whole life. Katie Mack did the last one. Growing up in California in the late 80s and early 90s she read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and then pursued an undergrad in Physics from CalTech followed by a PhD in astrophysics from Princeton … before starting even more fascinating work doing things like -- no big deal! -- building a dark matter detector. And then, yes, writing a truly mind-bending book about how the universe will eventually … end. Because there is a finish line. I warn you: There is a steep learning curve in this book and, if you’re like me, you’ll need to flip back pages a lot to digest it. A lot may fly over your head. It did mine. But Katie goes to great pains to make this accessible and I think she did a better job than Stephen Hawking did. Every chapter pushed my mind farther and farther out. Much like ... the universe? The universe is lucky to have an engaging, generous, and funny teacher like Katie Mack. Btw: My 3 Books conversation with Katie drops on the new moon tomorrow at 5:54 pm. I'd love you to sit down with us to talk big puzzles, time, living on Mars, the possibility of alien life, and, as always, formative books. Join us on Apple or Spotify. And, if you're up for helping me spread the messages and books from Katie and other amazing guests, please consider leaving a review. It really helps.

7. The Collected Essex County by Jeff Lemire. (L/I/A)This is one of the most emotionally rich, textured, and satisfying graphic novels I’ve ever read and I put it up on the high mantle with books like Maus by Art Spiegelman or Berlin by Jason Lutes. On the surface it’s a simple story of a young boy sent to live with his mom’s brother at his small-town farm after she dies of cancer but it starts with that seedling and goes deeper and deeper into, well, almost everything. His relationship with his father, how we handle feelings of regret and loss, the history of generational trauma in a small town, and all kinds of twisting family stories that weave together across generations. This is a truly masterful storytelling feat. If you like sweeping family sagas like East of Eden or Anna Karenina or, well, any of these, then you’ll love this book. I found myself crying at two in the morning several times while reading it and, weeks later, I keep thinking about it. A masterpiece. Highly recommended.

8. I Am The Subway by Kim Hyo-eun. Translated by Deborah Smith. (L/I/A)That was a pretty heavy list of books! Let's close off with a wonderful palette cleanser. The Seoul subway is often considered the longest in the world and carries over 7 million people a day. As you can tell from the cover above the book features the most incredible artwork and is told from the POV of ... the subway. A hypnotic ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum echoes through the book. Hugely bestselling book in Korea and newly translated into English. They stamp an Age 3-7 on it but, as always, perfect for all ages. No book shame, no book guilt.

9. You're at the end! Here are a few loot bag treats: The CBC asked me to publicly thank someone on the air and they found and we surprised my sixth grade teacher. I am often asked how to encourage young readers and one surefire way is to hand them some Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books. Deep New Yorker piece there and my interview with 90-year-old CYOA creator Edward Packard right here. We should be seeing the world through the eyes of children more often. And a nice piece citing great research to remind us, once again, that experiencing awe cultivates happiness and lowers stress. "You don’t need to visit the Grand Canyon or witness the birth of your child to experience awe. The awe-inspiring is all around you.... 'You can have your mind blown in mundane, minuscule ways...' Turns out we've been onto something this whole time!

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

Click here to join the Book Club email list.

Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - August 2022

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

Hey everyone,

Reading books is an act of resistance!

Screens sexier, algorithms grabbier, and the dreamy escape of falling into a book becomes a little more difficult. As always, I’m talking to myself here, as I have noticed that I’m trying to read more than I used to. One thing that helps? This book club. “Make a public commitment” is one of eight things I suggest to 10x your reading rate. If those eight resonate, then here’s a follow-up I wrote with eight more.

Also, do you have a favorite “book channel”? That helps, too. Who is doing great work to read, share, and recommend books? A few from me: Anne Bogel’s "What Should I Read Next?", Derek Sivers book page, Roxane Gay’s Goodreads Reviews, Ryan Holiday’s Reading Recommendation Email, and Herbert Lui’s Best of Books Newsletter. If you have one you suggest, just reply and let me know!

Enjoy the last few days of August and I’m excited to keep reading beside you in September.

And now … to the pages!

Neil

1. Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. (L/I/A) This book is 101 very short essays that slowly and iteratively build on each other to ultimately pull off a wild thought experiment. What’s the first essay? It’s on the cover! “1. There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” Simple, right? James Carse is just warming you up. Carse, btw, was an NYU history and religion professor who died in 2020 and somehow sprung this 149-page magic trick onto the world way back in 1986. I recommend it for anyone struggling with overwhelm or what I’ll call ‘life prioritization.’ The illumination is that most of what’s worth living for can be called an infinite game. Parenting, learning, loving your close friends well. Nice pairs with Clay Christenson’s famous How Will You Measure Your Life (which started as a talk and article) For me, most of the value in this book came in the early pages and, actually, the metaphor felt like it might collapse like a wet chocolate cake in the middle. But what I’m saying is: the first 50 pages of this book are worth way more than the ticket price. That’s all you need to read! Highly recommended.

2. The Rights of the Reader by Daniel Pennac. (L/I/A) One issue with infinite games? They’re a lot harder to play. In chapter two of The Happiness Equation I wrote about getting addicted to blog stats and bestseller lists in my late 20s and early 30s. I shared research on how extrinsic motivators actually hide intrinsic motivators from our brain and result in ultimately lower quality results. But they’re so much more visible, tempting, and, yes, finite. I started 3 Books in my late 30s – almost five years ago – and I really wanted to steer myself away from these temptations. I made sure I couldn’t access my own podcast stats. I decided to publish on the (at least) 30,000 year old lunar calendar instead of the 500 year old Pope Gregory calendar. I don’t accept guest pitches and stay focused on inviting people on who are interesting – whether or not they can offer big swirls of traffic from their own ‘platform’. And, lastly, I never spend or receive a dollar on advertising. (“Gratis being the only currency in art,” writes Daniel Pennac.) So I was hoping 3 Books would become a ‘word of mouth’ show – growing from reader to reader, teacher to teacher, friend to friend. Now, the extrinsic stuff always shows up – the show won Apple’s “Best Of” Award and I get pitches from people who point at stats showing it’s one of the top 0.5% podcasts in the world -- but just by focusing away from extrinsic allows intrinsic to bubble up. Then I feel more priceless (and measureless) bits of love get more visible on the surface. Like this book. I got it with a handwritten postcard from 3 Booker Jen Penn of Sandwich, Illinois, who wrote “Neil, you’re so generous in sending books to your 3 Books listeners – I thought it might be nice for you to receive a book! Thanks for enriching my reading life.” I had never heard of Daniel Pennac before! Or this book! It was written in French in 1992 and translated to English in 2006 and it features wonderful drawings throughout from (Sir!) Quentin Blake. Swervy, conversational, engaging, poppy, and, ultimately ending with a wonderful 30-page pronouncement called “The Rights Of The Reader.” What are the rights? (1) The Right Not To Read, (2) The Right To Skip, (3) The Right Not To Finish A Book, (4), The Right To Read It Again, (5) The Right To Read Anything, (6) The Right To Mistake A Book For Real Life, (7) The Right To Read Anywhere, (8) The Right To Dip In, (9) The Right To Read Out Loud, (10) The Right To Be Quiet. A lot overlap with the 3 Books Values! And, more than anything, the book serves as an accessible and non-judgemental invitation to further deepen your (so very obvious) love of books.

3. Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies by Michael Ausiello. (L/I/A) I mentioned a couple months ago that Book Clubber Casey Coleman replied to my May Book Club suggesting I read more queer literature. I asked for suggestions, he sent a huge list, and then I started with Lot by Bryan Washington. I loved it and featured it in my June Book Club. Now we’re in August. And my wife Leslie got to another book from Casey’s pile. So here she is: “After finishing Scarborough I had that ‘I will never love a book again’ feeling and was reluctant to read the first page of this when I saw it in one of Neil’s (many) piles looking for something to read before bed. And, honestly, I fell right into it. Maybe it’s just a Rebound Book, cause there’s something about it that feels a bit trashy or gossipy but, at the same time, that’s why I love it. Some nights I read maybe one page. Some nights I read a lot more. And Michael Ausiello gets me laughing minutes before I’m tearing up with his descriptions of awkward situations and vivid details that describe the mixed, dimensional, complicated emotions that unite us as humans. From around age 30 to age 43, Michael was in a long-term relationship with photographer Kit Cowan. This memoir chronicles their relationship including the sad and final last year of Kit’s life (which is also the first year of their marriage) after he was diagnosed with a rare and brutal type of cancer. Get the Kleenex ready.” (PS. Dan Savage helped write the screenplay and the movie is coming out from Focus Features in December.)

4. Keep Going by Austin Kleon. (L/I/A) Austin Kleon has +100 Internet Karma points. Opening his weekly newsletter feels like flipping open a barnacle-covered treasure chest. His website AustinKleon.com offers deep swims through pools of wisdom. Now, if you know Austin’s books, I’m guessing you know Steal Like An Artist. Biggest, most popular, the one you see everywhere. But this one, published seven years later in 2019, is the one I find myself picking up lately. Full of Austin’s endlessly pithy and often counterintuitive advice it’s a War Of Art-like kick in the pants to creatively keep on keeping on. “Forget the noun, do the verb,” he writes on Page 62, a great reminder to eschew labels in favor of focusing on the practice while allowing for natural creative sidesteps. What does he mean? “If you only aspire to be a ‘creative,’ you might simply spend your time signaling that you are one: wearing designer eyeglasses, typing on your Macbook Pro, and Instagramming photos of yourself in your sun-drenched studio.” On the difficulty of changing our minds today? “Social media has turned us all into politicians. And brands. Everyone’s supposed to be a brand now, and the worst thing in the world is to be off-brand.” On focusing on intrinsic instead of trying to monetize everything? “Let the low-hanging fruit fall off and rot.” Part of the magic of Austin’s work is that you can see his process. He uses social media as public journals, he shares what he’s thinking in a glue-in-a-scrapbook kind of way. And he’s always creating! He told me how Henry David Thoreau and David Sedaris taught him the magic of constant creation. I flew down to Texas and had lunch with Austin at Mi Madre’s in East Austin recently so, yes, look up to the sky! When our coming Harvest Moon is fully plumpy – September 10th, 5:59am! – my chat with Austin will drop as Chapter 111 of 3 Books. (Need a creativity jolt before then? Check out Brad Montague or IN-Q!)

5. The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly. (L/I/A) Remainder bins are full of five year old books written by ‘futurists’. Kind of a lose-lose scenario, writing those. Either you got it right … and now there’s no reason to read your book. Or you got it wrong … and now there’s no reason to read your book. Plus Faith Popcorn kicks you off her Christmas card list. Well, Kevin Kelly is not a futurist. (“We’re living in a long now,” he says.) But he does tell you what’s going to happen. In his 2010 book What Technology Wants he posited a fascinating tech-determinism theory that is equal parts brilliant and (depending on your seat in the theater) scary. In this 2016 book he shares 12 thirty-year trends. And the best part is reading this book today, six years post-pub, you really can just feel them all happening. Like Flowing ("depending on unstoppable streams in real time for everything"), Cognifying ("Making everything much smarter using cheap powerful AI from the cloud"), and Tracking ("employing total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers"). It makes sense why the David Pogue blurb inside says “Anyone can claim to be a prophet, a fortune teller, or a futurist, and plenty of people do. What makes Kevin Kelly different is that he’s right.” A Boggle-like brain shake from the septuagenarian former editor of WIRED and The Whole Earth Catalog. The book tilts very optimistic as Kevin “…celebrates the never-ending discontent that technology brings because this discontent is the trigger for our ingenuity and growth.” I was very lucky to sit down with Kevin Kelly for 3 Books. Our chat dropped at 4:17am this morning, which was the exact minute of the new moon. You can listen on Apple or Spotify. (Or check it out on YouTube - I experimented with filming this one.)

6. Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill. (L/I/A) This is the kind of book where if you’ve read it and you meet someone else whose read it I suspect you both just quietly nod and let out a long, slow deep breath. (Like A Little Life maybe? Though I haven’t read that.) Immersive, piercing, troubling, shocking. Heather O’Neill says in an interview “I knew I was going to take readers to places they’d never been before.” So what’s it about? Baby was born to parents who were 15. Her mom died a year later and the story begins in a first-person sort-of-journal-entry style when she’s 12 and being raised by her dad Theo in downtown Montreal. Theo is addicted to heroin and she bounces between foster homes and apartments with him while mostly living on the street. Eventually the local pimp Alphonse takes interest in her and, well, it goes from there. Not as fifth-gear as A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, but if you loved that (and I did), then I think you’ll love this, too.

7. The Monocle Book of Gentle Living. (L/I/A) Back in 2015 I was at a lunch with a graphic designer and web developer and they were both toting copies of Monocle magazine. “Monocle magazine?” I asked. “Isn’t that the $25 magazine full of Rolex ads for rich people in airports?” Well, they said, sure, but it’s also a real pinnacle of design. I learned Monocle is a globally based brand run by Tyler Brûlé, a Torontonian living in Zurich. I started reading and the voice was powerful – like some kind of enlightened, pithy, smartass? They call themselves a ‘briefing on global affairs, business, culture, design and more’ for a globally minded audience. They have 24,000 magazine subscribers and (unlike almost every magazine in the world) it’s growing. Plus their own little shops in Zürich, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Toronto, and Tokyo. This is a side-project coffee table book series and it’s well worth buying to flip through. Captivating photos, literary captions, and an air of authority. Feels like having a leisurely lunch at the Four Seasons rooftop with your jet-setting pal. The advice is solid, though, with suggestions on everything from simple gardening gear to get back into nature (and how to pull off an incredible garden on an apartment balcony) to spotlights on local bakeries and bookstores. Fun!

8. Everybody by Elise Gravel. (L/I/A) “EVERYBODY is unique and different. But we are more similar than we think. EVERYBODY has fears. EVERYBODY makes mistakes … Ow! … and everybody can learn from them.” These are the opening lines of this wonderfully rendered 40-page picture book about empathy and emotional self-acceptance. Elise Gravel’s illustrations are what I’d describe as a wonderful bright-pastelly, psychedelic, bizarro McDonaldland-type aesthetic. Pairs well with Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder.

9. The Hobbit by J.R.Tolkien. (L/I/A) According to this slightly dubious table on Wikipedia, The Hobbit is one of only six books in the world that have sold over 100 million copies. I hadn’t read it until this summer. My oldest son has taken to flying through a few thin chapter books a night so The Hobbit served as a healthy form of reading quicksand. I read 10 pages to him a night and he sung all the songs in the text. (There are lots!) You probably don’t need me to tell you it’s a wonderfully rollicking quest with a soft glowing magic emanating off the pages from its endless voices, wordplay, and twists. This beautiful clothbound version was published in 2013 and features new illustrations by Jemima Catlin who was asked by Christopher Tolkien via Harper Collins to add her flair to the book. (Here are some samples.) My son’s life has changed a lot in the past couple months. He changed his name. He’s going to a new school. He's made new friends and lost old ones. He’s felt in place and out of place. And he’s navigating his own personality as it quickly congeals. I feel, I hope, like 10 pages a night of The Hobbit offered a consistent grounding force. I know it did for me. Highly recommended. (PS. If you want to see inside, here’s a YT video.)

10. There is no ten! But you made it all the way to the end so here are a few stocking stuffers. Kevin Kelly's TED Talk "The future will be shaped by optimists", Bangkok-and-Singaporean-based design agency Anonymous created a wonderful little resource called Books Read By, a whale shark having a bite to eat, half a million swallows set off weather alerts, Ryan Holiday's "11 ways to be happy and productive", and Oliver Burkeman offers a cure for those struggling with "personal knowledge management."

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

Click here to join the Book Club email list.

Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - July 2022

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

Hey everyone,

Hope you’re doing well.

I saw a tweet the other day that read “I’m tired of living in unprecedented times.” Who can relate? Sometimes things are a bit too bumpy. Endlessly addictive feeds run by algorithms that have long outsmarted us continue steering us farther and farther away from our naturally gray zones towards thinking in blacks and whites … zeros and ones.

As always, books offer an escape from the matrix. We are what we eat and we are what we read, after all. Here's to pushing back against the tiny boxes we're constantly ushered into and slipping back into an embrace of our all-over-the-place-ness ...

Keep turning the page,

Neil

1. The Hidden Lives of Owls: The Science and Spirit of Nature’s Most Elusive Birds by Leigh Calvez. (L/I/A) “As an engineer, I marvel at their adaptations that allow them to do what they do,” says an owler named Jamie early in this book, “From special feathers that channel sound into their ears, to their eyes that see so much better in low light than ours, to feathers on their leading primaries that break up the airflow into small turbulences to reduce noise. Even their talons are arranged to support maximum efficiency.” A wonderful book following science writer Leigh Calvez as she slowly wades into the 67-million-years-and-counting evolutionary history of owls. Chock-full of endlessly fascinating owl insights and the history of the thousands of years long human-owl relationship. Broken up by species by chapter, the book swivels 270 degrees towards Snowy Owls, Burrowing Owls, Great Gray Owls, and eight others. By the end it starts veering more memoir and less field guide but ultimately it opens up a world we all live beside and, for the most part, just ... never know. I saw the first owl of my life a couple years ago and since then have been growing enchanted with these near-mystical creatures. Beautiful illustrations by Tony Angell throughout. Highly recommended.

2. Scarborough: A Novel by Catherine Hernandez. (L/I/A) Toronto is the fourth largest city in North America after Mexico City, New York, and Los Angeles, and is made up of five boroughs. Scarborough is likely the most diverse of the five -- culturally, ethnically, racially – and this book folds every corner of the sprawling community into a raw and mesmerizing read. When Leslie and I first started dating she was a Kindergarten teacher in a low-income neighborhood in Scarborough and the book feels like it could have been written by a handful of kids from her class. Every chapter alternates viewpoints, Babysitters Club Super Special-style, and the result is a portrait of deep poverty, urban blight, and soaring and (often) sinking hearts in the Kingston-Galloway neighborhood of Scarborough (where 41% of residents live in subsidized housing and 29% live in poverty). The fine point detail in this book is stunning and if you're from Toronto or have visited you'll get a double-whammy. Stories are loosely held together by the narrative of Hina, a young woman who runs the local literary center, as she jousts with decision-makers far from the community she serves. A poetic masterpiece. Highly recommended. (Also turning into a movie!)

3. Bug Boys by Laura Knetzger. (L/I/A) Charming, strange, heartwarming graphic novel series aimed at 7-10 year olds featuring two sensitive beetle friends named Stag-B and Rhino-B as they grow up in Bug Village. After buying a book from old Dung Beetle they find a strange map. What is it? They can’t ask old Dung Beetle because he was eaten by a bird (cue a tiny interrupting frame popping in with a beetle with a long white beard and a cane in a bird’s beak screaming “Avenge me!!!”) so instead they visit the Great Chrysalis, which has been around since before Bug Village was formed, to wish for success in finding treasure. This is just the first two pages. All the little stories are unpredictable, meander in interesting places, and offer endless childlike wonderings, all wrapped inside an insect wonderland. Non-conformist, emotionally available, and lots of fun.

4. Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell. (L/I/A) In 1975 Sam Walton heard the employees at a Korean tennis ball factory open their day with a company cheer and when he got back to Bentonville he tried the idea out at Walmart. It stuck and became one of the ‘cult-like culture’ totems profiled in Built To Last, the 1994 Jim Collins mega-hit. Jim said companies who succeed often have cult-like cultures featuring fervently held ideologies, indoctrination, tightness of fit, and elitism. Now, in today’s hijacked mind era, most tribes, communities, and organizations follow many of these cult-like principles. This book takes a modern blog-post- style approach to examining how everything from SoulCycle to Trader Joe’s to Instagram influencers wield elements of cult conditioning. I would have really loved a detailed Table of Contents. Amanda's voice sounds like a close (and very articulate) friend long-texting you in real time. Pairs well with How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell and Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino.

5. How Animals Understand The World by Ed Yong. I fell in love with the prolific Ed Yong during the pandemic. As The Atlantic’s Science Editor I found his articles clear, research-based, and always spot on. (Here’s the archive.) I wasn’t the only one! He won the Pulitzer Prize last year for his covid work. What's he up to now? Well, the current issue of The Atlantic features his cover story, adapted from his brand new instant bestseller An Immense World, about how human noise and light is crashing all kinds of ecological systems globally. As just one example, the annual 9/11 “Tribute of Light” where New York City flashes two beams of light up where the twin towers stood … kills millions of migratory birds. This article taught me the wonderful word umwelt and is yet another baby-step towards helping us see outside our species. Highly recommended. Click here to read the full piece and click here to check out his book which has a much wider scope than this piece.

6. Where I Belong: Small Town To Great Big Sea by Alan Doyle. (L/I/A) The very last province to join Canada was Newfoundland – a great big island way out in the Atlantic Ocean. The culture in Newfoundland is unique with its own 30-minutes-off-everything time zone, endless small fishing towns, a deep sense of community and kindness (Come From Away wasn’t an anomaly!), and, of course, the tradition of having visitors ("mainlanders") get ‘screeched in.’ I tell you as someone who got screeched in recently that it turns out kissing a cod isn’t as bad as it sounds. Big thanks to book club reader Marj Mossman for recommending I pick up this wonderful Newfie memoir by Alan Doyle. Alan was born in Petty Harbour in a big, poor, happy family, and he’s probably best known as the lead singer of Great Big Sea. Have you ever wanted to read a whole chapter on how to chop out cod tongues? Now you can! Wrapped in endless warm storytelling and Newfie charm. A great book to read if you're curious about Newfoundland or planning to visit.

7. Birds of Newfoundland by Ian Wakentin and Sandy Newton. (L/A) And I can’t talk about Newfoundland without recommending my favorite bird book if you’re going. Newfoundland has such a unique combination of thick boreal forests, wide-open tundras, and soaring cliffs for nesting sea birds like Atlantic Puffins and Northern Gannets. Back in the early 1940s the Dominion of Newfoundland (pre-Canada!) began a ten year project called The Birds of Newfoundland and invited famed ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson to come take a look. He ended up watercolor painting an incredible series of plates (including the one on the cover) and they’re featured throughout the book. A wonderful guide.

8. Penthouse Letters: The Down and Dirty Lust by the Editors of Penthouse Magazine. (L/A) According to a 2018 study 98% of men and 73% of women (or 86% of respondents total) report using Internet pornography in the past six months. Combine with the fact that algorithms have outhacked us at this point – reducing content down to its most addictive bits to keep us endlessly clicking -- and it means our broad, vast, multi-dimensional sexual curiosities and imaginations are often neutered at the source. How do kids learn about sex these days besides endless two-minute hardcore clips? Down in Key West Judy Blume and I talked about the virtues of learning about sex from books. I’m not sure a steamy Sidney Sheldon scene is going to cut it now but … what about Penthouse Letters? I picked up a copy at a bookstore – figuring hey, anything in its 48th edition must be doing something right. Less screens, more imagination, and a literary boost back into the wide world of sexuality. On this and other sex topics, Leslie and I sat down with Rebecca the Sex Educator recently and we’ll be dropping the chat on 3 Books on the next full moon.

9. We Learn Nothing: Essays by Tim Kreider. (L/I/A) I think one of the best New York Times Op-Eds of all time is The Busy Trap by Tim Kreider. I finally got around to picking up the book of essays containing it and it features wonderful writing exploring all kinds of unexplorables. “What if you survive a brush with death and it doesn’t change you?”, “Why do we fall in love with people we don’t even like?”, “How do you react when a childhood friend suddenly abandons you?” The essays have a David Foster Wallace sense of wildness – and cynicism. Judd Apatow says the book is “Heartbreaking, brutal, and hilarious” and that seems about right. Sometimes they were too harsh, unrelatable, or naval-gazey for me but that’s what I like about a book of essays – it's easy to skip to the next one.

10. There is no ten! But you made it all the way to the end so here are a few stocking stuffers. Ubermensch Seth Godin put together a team of volunteers to create the stunning Carbon Almanac. I really liked Are You Not Entertained? by Mark Manson. I asked on Twitter "What book would you gift to 15-18 year olds?" and "What are the best movie opening scenes?" (A friend and I spent a night watching most of these -- try it!) Eric Barker has put out an incredible newsletter for years and his most recent is New neuroscience reveals 5 secrets that will make you lose weight. If you want to keep tilting your inbox away from spam and towards long fun reads then I also highly recommend Nora Borealis's great one -- and her new book Bad Vibes Only this fall!

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

Click here to join the Book Club email list.

Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - June 2022

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

Hey everyone,

If you're looking for summer escape I hope a book below intrigues you. If not, I also wrote an article offering 19 more beach reads (for people who don't want to turn their brain off).

Also, I was standing in a parking lot in the Bronx a couple weeks ago when Latanya and Jerry of the amazing Bronx Bound Books Bus started telling me about Libro.FM. I fell in love with it! And used it to listen to half of the new David Sedaris this month. Basically: It's an audiobook company where profits go to the local indie bookstore of your choice and where you own your audio files completely. Why switch from Audible? They made a whole page to explain. I get nothing for telling you about them -- just loved it and wanted to share.

Last thing: If you'd like a daily one line awesome thing through the summer (no ads ever), just sign up here. I began writing the pandemic edition of 1000 Awesome Things in April, 2020 and we have 196 days left. (I'll also be making a big book announcement on that list after the summer.)

Okay! Let's get to the books,

Neil

1. Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon. (L/I/A) Alok ("A-loke") Vaid-Menon was born in College Station, Texas in 1991 to parents from India and Malaysia. When they were young they’d dress up in their mom and sister’s clothes and dance around the living room to Bollywood hits for all their extended family, including their Auntie Urvashi (a gender non-confirming lesbian of color and national activist). The entire room would clap and cheer them on over syrupy bowls of gulab jamon. But when they performed a similar routine onstage at the school talent show at age six ... they got laughed at by the entire school. Thus began a shame-filled odyssey of pretending to live as a boy -- or, at least, male-presenting -- for many years. And it also began an astounding conversation about gender which they're helping to lead globally today. This book firms Alok's place as a dynamic, powerful, and clairvoyant voice. I folded the corners of at least 20 of this slim 58-page book and found myself underlining quote after quote. (Here are some popular quotes from the book.) I grew up the son of Indian immigrant parents in Canada with male and female binaries and the accompanying blue and pink clothes in blue and pink nurseries. Gender divides only deepened with age and, looking back, I know they caused me to self-censor sides of myself. Painting my toenails to hide them in my socks, buying The Babysitter Club books “for my sister”, and quitting figure skating once I became the only boy at the rink. This book helped me remember, see, and accept a bit more of myself. And who is Alok? They created the global #DeGenderFashion movement, headlined the 2021 New York Comedy Festival, graduated at the top of their class twice at Stanford, and have lectured and performed in over 40 countries around the world. This is a complete riptide of an essay. Highly recommended.

2. Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris. (L/I/A) It kills me to say this but I … didn’t like this book. Ugh. That sentence feels wrong – shocking almost. I was sure (positive!) I would love this book. I loved Calypso, his last one, and ranked that just below Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day on the lofty Sedaris medals podium. I’ve loved nearly everything David has written for decades. Twenty-two years ago I took a three-hour train ride from Kingston, Ontario to the big city of Toronto to have dinner with Jay Pinkerton. Jay was the former editor of the school comedy paper I was about to help run and I was looking for advice. He gave me lots and when I left handed me a copy of Naked by David Sedaris and said “Read this.” An opening essay, “A Plague of Tics”, about his growing obsessive compulsive disorder was captivating. I went back and discovered essays about working as an Elf at Macy’s, living in a dorm at Kent State University for disabled students, and hitchhiking across the country. They were like nothing I’d read before and it was a huge thrill four years ago to hang out with him and get an up-close masterclass in writing. Flash forward to today and David’s essays cover topics around how he and his sister Amy both bought apartments above theirs in Manhattan during the pandemic and his snap purchase of a $3000 jacket that didn’t fit him. I don’t judge him for these things. The honesty is refreshing. (How many rich people pretend they’re not?) But they seem more out of place than usual, wrapped in a sharper anger, a vitriol, and a not-quite-but-almost disorienting strangeness. His wit remains sharp and cutting, and there are certainly gems like his cataloguing of walking barren New York streets at the start of Covid. But: something’s off. David says near the end of the book these essays didn’t get the gift of getting fine-tuned by audiences as his endless touring came to a halt during the pandemic. “It’s not just the applause I’m listening for but the quality of the silence.” Maybe that’s it. He’s still deliciously anti-PC and his incredibly attuned eye remains well-braided with the beautiful-ugly side of self-examination. Halfway through the book I switched to listening to it on Libro.FM and that gave it new energy and life. I still really love David and am sure (positive!) I will love his next one. 

3. Lot by Bryan Washington. (L/I/A) I got an email the other day from Casey which read: “Way back in college (11ish years ago) you were on the Today Show and I had the chance to cross paths with you! 1000 Awesome Things was one of my favorite blogs in college. I was navigating coming out and it helped me prioritize my mental health and realize how much joy there was in the world.” (Here’s a picture of us!) Casey and I kept in touch and he wrote back to my May Book Club with a long list of suggested queer literature. I bought the first one on the list – this one! – and read it this month. Wow. What a stunner. A debut collection of short stories all tangentially telling tales of down-and-out Houston through (mostly) the lens of a half-latino-half-black teen working at his family restaurant and navigating distant siblings and a disappearing dad all while coming to grips with being gay. Crackling popping prose that reminded me of Junot Diaz. The accessibility and zing here makes this a great book to study the art of writing. Came out in 2019 and won a slate of fancy awards plus made Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. Highly recommended. 

4. Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation by Natalie Henrich and Joseph Henrich. (L/I/A) Maybe a year ago I read chunks from The WEIRDest People On Earth: How The West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Stuffed to the gills with fascinating charts, ideas, and theories, I traced back the author’s other stuff and came upon this one which I thought might help illuminate some of the bigger issues around our dive-bombing trust levels. It’s a decent book but unfortunately only the first couple chapters offer much. The definition of cooperation feels off (“Cooperation occurs when an individual incurs a cost to provide a benefit for another person or people”) and then most of the book is actually a deep academic field study about an insular group of middle-class Iraqi Christians (called Chaldeans), living in metro Detroit, exploring their kinship relations, ethnicity, and traditions and trying to use that as a barometer for cooperation through generations.

5. The Big Bath House by Kyo Maclear. (L/I/A) Kyo is a magical (and magically underrated!) author. We love her The Good Little Book so much at our house and Birds Art Life is one of the most delicate and whimsical memoirs I’ve ever read. (Made my Best of 2019!) I am starting to fall into her orbit. This is Kyo’s newest work – a children’s book recounting her early childhood memories of visiting her grandmother in Japan and visiting bath houses. The book offers a rare acceptance and comfort with all body types, a vision of a world with less strictures and more acceptance between us, and, as my kids will joyfully tell you, a whooooooole lot of full-frontal. Publisher says for age 4-8 and offers this one-liner summary: “A joyful celebration of Japanese cultural traditions and body positivity as a young girl visits a bath house with her grandmother and aunties.” MatthewP on Amazon gives it 1-star and says “Great, lets normalize naked adults bathing with children. This is a dangerous book!” But others in our build-your-own-echo-chamber world call it a “Best Book of the Year” (like the New York Public Library, NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, and The American Library Association.) My kids loved it, Leslie and I loved it, and we didn’t feel it was dangerous in any way. Sure, the vision it depicts feels a long ways off but books are magical and being a dreamer is great fun. Kudos to Kyo for helping us find something we maybe didn’t know we lost. Pairs well with the wonderful Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder.

6. All About Love by bell hooks. (L/I/A) We are in our fifth year of our epic 1000 formative book countdown and it’s fun to see patterns emerging. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, and (you guessed it) All About Love by bell hooks are some of the most frequently chosen books on our list. (Recipients of the rare double asterisk!) bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, was an author and social activist with a flair for the pen. She wrote over 40 (!) books and this is her most popular. It stretches and peels open the word ‘love’ to reveal an active verb that most of us are likely practicing without much of a manual. Well, here it is! “How do we operationalize love because professing it is so easy and so cheap?”, Brené Brown asked us last year. Each chapter of this book is so deep, so rich, so sumptuous that, for me at least, it had to be read very slowly and sporadically. Want a few choice quotes to see if it resonates? “Our national spiritual hunger springs from a keen awareness of the emotional lack in our lives. It is a response to lovelessness.”, “To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”, and “The most precious gift true love offers is the experience of knowing we always belong.”

7. Raising Your Spirited Child by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka. (L/I/A) And now it’s time for this month's Leslie’s Pick, a book personally chosen and loved by my lovely wife. Enter Leslie: “Do you feel particularly challenged parenting your child and wonder if there might be something ‘wrong’ with you, or ‘different’ about them? Something that makes parenting harder for you than for other people? Do you have a child with lots of energy, an insatiable desire for attention, intense emotions, a louder voice, a more keen sensitivity? If so, you must pick up this book. It’s literally ‘a guide for parents whose child is more intense, sensitive, perceptive, persistent, and energetic’ and it gets right to the point, makes you feel less alone, and helps you accept your spirited child just as they are, and celebrate the characteristics in them that both makes parenting them challenging and ultimately very rewarding.” 

8. The Writer’s Library by Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager. (L/I/A) Nancy Pearl is a Superhero Librarian. (I mean, she’s actually been turned into a superhero.) She is wise and witty and well-read because, as she says, “I have chosen in this life not to do anything, basically, except read.” It comes as no surprise to me that she and Jeff Schwager took on a project very similar to 3 Books -- figuring out which books influenced some of the greats. We have only one overlap so far -- Dave Eggers! -- and this book features wonderfully long interviews with authors like Donna Tartt, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Andrew Sean Greer, etc. (Here's my interview with Nancy.)

9. Abel’s Island by William Steig. (L/I/A) A seemingly simple tale of a posh, urbane city mouse named Abelard navigating a lonely island after getting washed away in a rainstorm. William Steig, where have you been all my life? I had vaguely heard his name years ago as the author of the picture book Shrek but that’s about it. I learned Steig lived from 1907 to 2003 and didn’t start writing these wonderful children’s books until his early 60s. He wrote Shrek in his 80s! Someone gave us a little board book of Pete’s A Pizza a while back which is beautiful -- a father rolling his son into a pizza to cheer him up on a rainy afternoon -- and has long remained in our weekly rotation. Now I've read and really loved this layered and nuanced story told with accessible literary precision and offering a quiet contemplation on inner strength. If you (or someone you know) liked Hatchet, this is a great one.

10. Ten! There is no tenth book. But you made it to the end of the email so here are a few items in the bottom of the loot bag: 10 small daily habits to increase your productivity, a panda going to town on a stick of bamboo, Ryan Holiday's Best Parenting Advice, Labradoodle Creator Says The Breed Is His Life's Regret, and a little joy montage of children getting their first glasses.

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