Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - September 2025
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Hey everyone,
Hello from Nairobi!
I landed here last night excited to podcast with award-winning Kenyan novelist Peter Kimani and finally see the country my mum is from. (I share more on my mum's story in my book on resilience.)
It's been a great month! I turned 46 and published my fourth annual list of completely unsolicited birthday advice. Also dropped a fresh chapter of 3 Books with novelist and olive-oil-maker Robin Sloan.
Last week I spoke to 8000 people in beautiful Bucharest and Amsterdam and got to share a stage with luminaries like former Finland PM Sanna Marin and Simon Sinek. (Also saw some new birds in an abandoned concrete lake built by the Romanian dictator before the 1989 revolution!) Big thanks to those who said hello and are joining us here for the first time.
Oh, one more thing! 17 years and more than 3000 (!) awesome things later we are once again closing in on #1. (Full list here!) I started posting one awesome thing every night at midnight when my marriage was falling apart ... and I still am! Over 100,000 people read the daily awesome thing and if you'd like it in your inbox when the clock strikes midnight sign up here.
All righty.
Few updates from the awesomeverse and now ... time for the books!
Neil
1. The World’s Cheapest Destination: 26 Countries Where Your Travel Money Is Worth A Fortune by Tim Leffel (b. 1964). I noticed the other day on Twitter that Ramit Sethi (host of “How To Get Rich” on Netflix) posted this question he saw on Reddit:
Ramit said it was a great question. I agree! Because people telling you about their trips always sounds so expensive. That's where this life-changing perspective shift from plainspoken and accessible everyman Tim Leffel comes in. Tim writes the 22-year-running (!) ‘World’s Cheapest Destinations’ blog and in this book we have his well-written travel guides to 26 countries you maybe haven’t thought about visiting. Kyrgyzstan, Albania, Laos, oh my! He shows how to avoid the cultural homogenization amidst Starbucks-overrun hotspots and how to do so safely and cheaply. Last week I was in Romania—which I absolutely loved! highly recommend!—and flipped to Page 188 where Tim wrote: “It doesn’t get written up a lot as a ‘hot new destination’ and it lacks the kind of iconic bucket list attractions you see in your weekly Instagram feed from other parts of Europe, but Romania has a lot for budget travellers to like.” I got good restaurant and sightseeing recommendations and a nice feel for culture and costs. Each 8-10 page country writeup has an overview that feels like you’re talking to a friend over a beer and then splits into sub-categories like “Transportation”, “Accommodation”, “Food&Drink”, and “What Else.” (A couple sample “What Else”s from Kyrgyzstan on Page 91 are “The sightseeing options are rather limited in Bishkek unless you love Soviet monuments that glorify dictators and the happy muscular workers toiling away at the state-run factories and mines” and “What can you get for a buck or less: a large beer in a store, four loaves of bread, two kilos of fruits or vegetables, three iced teas on the street, two ice cream cones, 200 grams of local candy, a litre of petrol, a hearty bowl of stew, a plate of dumplings, a short taxi ride, three city bus rides.”) Tim has visited all the countries and the fact that this self-published masterpiece is in its 5th edition says a lot. Of course, the underpinning of the book is “It’s Not How You Go, but Where!” and Tim explains that “A taxi ride from the airport to the center of town is around $10 in Quito or Mexico City, but can hit $120 in Milan and $180 in Tokyo” with the takeaway that the secret is to “go where your first world dollars are worth a fortune.” He addresses the common “Isn’t it really dangerous there?” question by comparing crime rates in the US and England to countries he profiles (uh, guess what's worse!) as well as offering thoughtful guidance around avoiding border towns and how it’s “better to look a bit grubby rather than filthy rich.” If you feel like life is expensive, if you feel like you can’t afford to travel, if you feel like you want to live large or get out of dodge without breaking the bank, then grab this book and watch as it pays for itself again and again.
2. The 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith (1896-1990). This book is a gem! Everybody knows ‘101 Dalmatians’ was a Disney movie but not many know it was originally serialized in ‘Woman’s Day’ magazine in the mid-1950s as ‘The Great Dog Robbery’ from English playwright Dodie Smith. I sure didn't! The story is fun, fast-paced, literary, and serves as a great reading intermezzo if (like me) you feel bogged down by whatever’s on your bedside table and just want something quick and snappy. Reading nitro! Good to inject a bit of that on the ol' page-flipping engine. The book is fun. And realistic! Like check out this drawing of Cruella de Vil from page 18:
Scary, right? Turns out Cruella is an old classmate of Dalmatian couple Pongo and Missis’s pets (owners) and, of course, comes for dinner where she actually says out loud “Wouldn’t they make enchanting fur coats?” before, you know it, nabbing their puppies. That kicks off an adventurous chase across the country full of twists and turns and delightful characters. The book is literary! Full of cars with “strident” motor horns and apartments “seething” with Dalmatians. And adult emotions fold into the story, too. Like on Page 62: “Missis thumped her tail with joy—and with relief. For there had been moments when she had felt—not jealous, exactly, but just a bit wistful about Pongo’s affection for Perdita.” Or from Page 66 while on their chase: “‘You are a beautiful dog, Missis,’ said Pongo. ‘I am proud of you.’ / At this, Missis looked even more beautiful and Pongo even prouder of her. After a minute or so, he said, ‘Do you think I’m looking pretty fit?’ / Missis told him he looked magnificent, and wished she had said so without being asked. He was not a vain dog, but every husband likes to know that his wife admires him.” Ha! Nailed it, Dodie. Sure, the ending goes on a bit too long—got to satisfy that ‘Women's Day’ contract!—but, doesn't matter. Absolutely wonderful 70-year-old story to read to your kids or enjoy yourself. No book guilt, no book shame, as ever!
3. Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani (b.1971). So my mum was born right here in Nairobi, Kenya in 1950 and I came to realize recently I’ve read no novels from the country. The continent, really! Now I did just finish and enjoy ‘Weep Not, Child’ by Ngũgĩ wa Thing’o (08/2025) and this month I fell into this evocative and plot-twisting 2017 award-winning historical fiction novel from Peter Kimani. The book opens in 1901 as the natives see the railroad cross the country for the first time—“a monstrous, snakelike creature whose black head, erect like a cobra’s, pulled rusty brown boxes and slithered down the savanna, coughing spasmodically as it emitted blue-black smoke.” What a visual! Peter Kimani is a professor at Aga Khan University in Nairobi and got his PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Houston after spending time at the University of Iowa. This book folds stories of three men—Reverend Richard Turnbull, Scottish engineer Ian McDonald, and Indian clerk Babu Salim—into a contemporary tale of Babu’s grandson generations later. The plot skips forwards and backwards which makes it a merry-go-roundy reading experience but sometimes it’s good to be in the company of a book that makes you dizzy. Because, regardless, you're there. And in this case you're amongst the dazzling sights and sounds of pre- and post-colonial Kenya which is just a fascinating place to be. I'm excited to sit down with Peter and our chat should drop on the Beaver Moon!
4. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1929-1945). How do we see the human side of war? We don’t! We typically don’t. We flip past photos of buildings on fire or lineups of people pawing for aid on the streets and might feel some pain or human connection from great distance ... but we don’t get into hearts and minds. How can we? I don't know. I don't. Maybe poetry is one way? Good journalism. Dispatches! But, honestly, nothing beats a book. And especially … a diary. There is a guilty voyeuristic feeling of being inside a place—a mind—that wasn’t shared with even the others who were there at the time. Knowing I was going to be in Amsterdam last week I booked a visit to the Anne Frank House (highly recommend) and to get ready I read this fascinating time capsule of the inner life of precocious Anne as she goes into hiding and documents her life from the “Secret Annexe.” Her father was running a pectin factory in Amsterdam and behind a bookshelf in the factory was a series of rooms where Anne, her older sister, her parents, and her father’s business partner’s family hid ... for two years. The entries begin June 14, 1942 a couple days after receiving the diary for her 12th birthday (“We’re going to be great pals!”) and run till August 1, 1944 (“… if I’m quiet and serious, everyone thinks it’s a new comedy and then I have to get out of it by turning it into a joke, not to mention my own family, who are sure to think I’m ill, make me swallow pills for headaches and nerves, feel my neck and my head to see whether I’m running a temperature, ask if I’m constipated and criticize me for being in a bad mood.”) There is an invisible darkness in the pages but also lightness, triviality, natural emotional highs and lows, and it all adds up to a feeling of human connection and familiarity. Four days after the last entry the family was found and it’s said Anne died in a concentration camp in Germany in early 1945. What happens in the middle? Anne navigates a new life, misses fresh air, develops feelings for the boy she’s living with, feels like her mother doesn’t understand her, and confesses endlessly small and big thoughts through the minutiae that add up to a life. October 29, 1943: “… it is especially on Sundays that I feel rotten. The atmosphere is so oppressive, and sleepy and heavy as lead.” February 12, 1944: “The sun is shining, the sky is a deep blue, there is a lovely breeze, and I’m longing—so longing—for everything. To talk, for freedom, for friends, to be alone.” This book is a reminder to be grateful for freedoms we still have, a warning of pains and perils on the path if we lose them, and an inspiring connection to a fellow human, a beautiful human, across space and time.
5. The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali (b. 1971). And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick! (A full list of Leslie’s Picks are here.) Over to you, Les: “Gifted to me by one of my lifelong friends and, as a result, made all the more moving, this tale of lifelong friendships between two Iranian women speaks to the inevitable joys and hardships we face—both individually and as friends. Relatable in its exploration of insecurity, envy, and infatuation in friendships—I’ve never read a more intimate and accurate portrayal of what it feels like to be a young girl in love with your best friend. Devastating betrayals, acts of generosity, and deeply moving connections as these women navigate the political reality of being female in Iran over the past 40 years. Reminded me of ‘The Kite Runner’. I couldn’t put it down and have that ‘sad it’s over’ feeling now."
6. Trilogy by H.D. (1886-1961). While wandering the sandy surftown of Del Mar, California earlier this year I stumbled on the wonderful Hobbit-hole bookstore “Camino Books, For The Road Ahead” run by John and Alison (who joined us in Chapter 149 of 3 Books.)
If you’re in Del Mar do visit! They're right on the main strip at 1555 Camino Del Mar and open seven days a week. Here's their website! Here's their Instagram! Stunning place and reminded me of what James Daunt—the world’s largest bookseller with over 1000 stores!—says about great bookstore locations having odd corners, random pipes, slanted roofs, and other little uniquenesses. Anyway, back to John and Alison. We had a lovely chat and I really noticed John’s poetic turns of phrase. Alison told me he often writes poetry at night at home. Not publishing it! Just writing it. Btw he was the second indie bookseller I met who did that after Mitchell Kaplan (who runs Books&Books in Florida) told me he often bangs away at a typewriter late into the evening. I just love the image of writing poetry in longhand—or a typewriter—late into the night. I need a typewriter! (Do you feel the same way? Austin Kleon is an inspiration for us both.) Light a few candles, pour a glass of wine, get a fire going … and clack up some poetry. Can you do much better than that? Maybe there's a cat around, too. Anyway, before I left Camino, I asked John if he could recommend some poetry and he plucked this off the shelf. I’d never heard of it nor the author but quickly learned that H.D. was the nom de plume of Hilda Doolittle who was born in Pennsylvania in 1886 and became a contemporary of poets like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats. She wrote short, simple, precise, longform poems while living in London through the early 1940s—during and after The Blitz. The writing is a very unique combination of dark, cold, crystalline, and hopeful. The opening two stanzas might give a quick feel:
And it kind of goes like that. Three lines, three lines, always three lines. Paceful, easy to read, but so much meat on the bones. This version has helpful Reader’s Notes in the back so I was often flipping to figure out what a word or phrase meant or get some context. And, like most poetry I read, I didn’t understand entire chunks! But the parts that hit ... really hit. Great poetry to read if you’re sitting in emotions of challenge, pain, feeling the intensity and weight of the world, and want to feel a connection to others feeling the same way. Hilda Doolittle, H.D., felt the same way, and here she is right now—offering you her heart. Thank you John for the recommendation.
7. Moonbound by Robin Sloan (b. 1979). OK, I know I can’t stop talking about this book but it’s such a trippy and delightful escape. Since it just came out in a glow-in-the-dark (!) paperback, and since I just dropped a full-length chat with Robin, I thought I'd briefly go on about it again. Cory Doctorow says this book is "doing fiction in hard mode"—read his incredible full review here!—and it's a kind of epic fantasy with talking beavers. Talking swords! Strange video games. And ever-expanding worlds with wizards, who maybe aren’t really wizards, and the entire book is narrated by a microscopic AI-type chronicler, who’s been in many different lives across the millenniums, but who now sits in our protagonist’s left shoulder. The book is a kind of jacked up ‘Star Wars’ meets ‘Cloud Atlas’ by David Mitchell featuring Willy Wonka and Mad Hatter types with occasional moments of poignancy and reflection that let you see, and see around, our endlessly twisting lives together. A big, loud, cymbal crash of a book. And in my mind deserving of a larger audience! If you want to disappear into a cerebral rainbow-colored fantasy check it out from the library or visit my usual link-splitter to find a retailer you like.
8. Hannelore's Story Works handmade journals. I think it was on my birthday in 2017 that Leslie and I were up at the McMichael Gallery in Kleinberg, Ontario viewing a Tom Thomson exhibit. I love museum gift shops and in that gift shop I found a journal I’d come to love for years. Thick, heavy white paper no pen or marker leaked through. Bound with tightly tied string so I could lay it flat on my legs or airplane tray tables. And so unique! The little cut-out map of a zoomed in Ontario was clearly … a real map, that someone had cut out. So for my birthday a few years later Leslie got me another from the same one-woman craft company … then another … then another. I have four now! I don’t know Hannelore Sotzek but I love her homemade journals. I just wanted to highlight them in case you’re looking for a great journal for yourself or someone you love. Btw, since they're all homemade from physical papers and book covers a lot of things are sold out in her shop but it's worth poking around to find something you love. Here's her shop—and this isn't a paid ad or anything. Just something I enjoy.
9. There is no nine! Just our regular loot bag of links! My friend Boniface Mwangi is running for President of Kenya! Listen to my chat w the amazing Bonnie here or follow him on IG or Twitter. Wagner Moura is just getting better ... Leslie and I caught his new flick 'The Secret Agent' at TIFF. So good! Also saw and loved the new John Candy documentary 'I Like Me' which opened the festival. Two thumbs up on both. I learned about historical nostalgia and why 60% of Gen Zs say they wish they could return to a time before everyone was “plugged in.” Mark Manson gets vulnerable on reasons for quitting booze with lessons that apply to anything you're feeling addicted to, I think. Adam Grant shares books to fight brain rot, Arundhati Roy issues warnings for fear-based societies, the Center for Humane Technology tackles the OpenAI suicide litigation while investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr asks "Will OpenAI Kill Your Child?" A big congratulations to George Saunders on being awarded the 2025 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL). Thomas Friedman tells us how the rise of AI should unite the U.S. and China—with some compelling principles. What might be coming with robotaxis. Dan Pink shares 13 life changing books to read before you turn 30. Brené Brown talking about her new book and what she's been working on. Jean Twenge highlights one of my favourite rules: no phones in the bedroom (especially for kids)! And The Economist asks: "Is the decline of reading making politics dumber?" You made it! You read all the way to the very bottom.
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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - August 2025
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Summer, summer, where did she go?
It's been a blistering hot one up here in Toronto with smoky air billowing about. I have found myself thinking of 'Fire Weather' by John Vaillant (07/2023) and feeling simultaneously scorched by the heat with the occasional relief of jumping into a cold lake.
I was in 22 cities before the summer and next month I'm speaking and podcasting in Bucharest, Amsterdam, and Nairobi so our family system has the summers like lungs that power the rest. That and Leslie being a saint, of course. Really more of a celestial being who enables me and our family to do everything else. In addition to our four little ones parading back to four new rooms with four new teachers, Leslie is also returning to teaching this year as a downtown public school guidance counsellor and health teacher. I'm very excited for her and her students.
This month we've been chasing the kids around, swimming in lakes, going birding, and, of course, reading books.
In this era of shallow skimming, reading is an increasingly vital and necessary habit to work on to preserve deep thinking and feeling, grow our experiences of happiness, and, indeed, even live longer.
Reading is medicine!
Doesn't mean it's easy. It's not for me!
But we can always work on our reading habit.
I've been sending my book club to you for nigh on ten years. You can read the back issues here, send me comments anytime just by replying, and, as always, I am deeply grateful for our brief connection of hearts and minds across space and time.
Invite others to join us with a flashlight under the blanket here.
Let's get to the books!
Neil
1. Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin (1927-1987). This book will crawl and sniff out the pains in your heart, the ones you forgot were there, and shake them and soften them, so you may briefly see yourself in others—in their tortures, in their truths—and then forgive yourself, and forgive them, and be grateful for where you are and what you have. At least that's what it did for me. This was James Baldwin's very first novel, published in 1952, and it's a trauma-filled family soap opera stretching across generations. It takes place in the South and then up in Harlem “…where the houses did not rise, piercing, as it seemed, the unchanging clouds, but huddled, flat, ignoble, close to the filthy ground, where the streets and the hallways and the rooms were dark, and where the unconquerable odor was of dust, and sweat, and urine, and homemade gin.” (Page 28). Issues abound! Godlessness, for one. Sister McCandless clucks on Page 53 regarding the younger generation not showing up to church: “'They cooling off something terrible. The Lord ain’t going to bless no church what lets its young people get so lax, no sir. He said, because you ain’t neither hot or cold I’m going to spit you outen my mouth. That’s the Word.'” The characters in this book are the Word. They're so clear, so detailed. The book opens in a semi-autobiographical tone with our adolescent protagonist John walking into a violent family scene and then zooms into the backstories of multiple characters before ending back up in the present. His dad becomes a brother, his aunt becomes a sister, his mom becomes a young lover with a different man. And the drama is told through vivid characters with those voices that pop. From Page 132 from Esther: “I… just want to go somewhere, go somewhere, and have my baby, and think all this out of my mind. I want to go somewhere and get my mind straight. That’s what I want you to do—and that’s pretty cheap. I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore.” Later, we’re in the living room of the holy man’s sister (so John's aunt) as she’s recounting the issues with a new friend: “'She say she think my brother’s got a bastard living right there in the same town what he’s scared to call his own.'/'No? And I thought you said your brother was a preacher.'/'Being a preacher ain’t never stopped a n— from doing his dirt.'” Reading this book feels like being outside on a day where the weather oscillates between hulking storm clouds and moments of cloud-parting sun. The plot is tricky—I highly recommend reading the Wikipedia plot summary before and during the book if you need to (like I did)—but then, once you do, once you see the layers, it's just gorgeous prose, 3D characters, and a serving of that uniquely brutal heart-scalding beauty that we really only get from great novels.
2. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake (b. 1987). Don’t look now but while you are reading this fungi are busy “eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behaviors, and influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere.” (Page Page 3) Do you ... take statins? Drink alcohol? Eat truffles? Take antibiotics? Just a few of the hundreds of ways our lives revolve around fungi—and seemingly always have. Fungi are one of our living kingdoms, as "broad as busy a category as animals and plants," and evolved before those two. There are many historical records of our species living an entangled life with fungi seemingly since before we were us. (No wonder the glacial Iceman, that famed preserved Neolithic corpse from 5000 years ago, had a pouch stuffed with “wads of the tinder fungus that he almost certainly used to make fire, and carefully prepared fragments of the birch polypore mushroom most probably used as medicine.”) Our lives are deeply entwined with fungi and yet we know so comparatively little about them. Enter this gloriously illuminating book which serves to shrink our own lives—our worries, our fears—into the wider and vaster world of living things we make up only a tiny, tiny fraction of. Are fungi controlling us? Harvesting us? Using our minds to plant thoughts and behaviours? A fascinating middle chapter called “Mycelial minds” explores how psilocybin mushrooms (what many of us perhaps grew up knowing as 'magic mushrooms' or 'shrooms') have demonstrated an “ability to soften the rigid habits of our minds that makes these chemicals powerful medicines capable of relieving severe addictive behaviors, otherwise incurable depression, and the existential distress that can follow the diagnosis of terminal illness.” (Page 96) A Johns Hopkins study even showed that after a single dose of psilocybin, 80% of patients showed reduced “demoralization and hopelessness, improved spiritual well-being, and increased quality of life.” (Page 107). They’ve also been proven to help smokers and alcoholics break severe addictions! Big in scope, endlessly curiosity-stimulating, and arranged in an organic, haphazard, expanding-underground-network type of way this is a weird, wonderful, and impossible-to-forget look at a much bigger world outside ourselves.
3. Next To Heaven by James Frey (b. 1969). And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick—a book personally read by my saintly partner Leslie. (Btw, you can check out the full list of Leslie’s Pick’s right here.) Over to you, Les! “I still remember the rush of not being able to put down ‘A Million Little Pieces’ (9/2017) and I never even cared that there was that whole debacle over how true it all was. For me it was just a mind expanding, empathy building, rush of a ride to read and I loved it. So, when Neil handed me James Frey’s new book, ‘Next to Heaven’ I was excited to dive in. And it did not disappoint. Kind of like White Lotus in its satirical commentary on the super rich, ‘Next to Heaven’ had me turning pages late into the night, escaping into the scandalous love lives of a handful of New Bethlehem’s elite. Sexy, spicy, juicy and still somehow heartwarming and relatable.” Thank you, Les! For those interested in more James Frey (pronounced “Fry”, btw) check out this sit-down he just did with Rich Roll or my 2019 conversation with him here when he published his last novel ‘Katerina’ (09/2018).
4. All About Birds by Robert S Lemmon (1885-1964), Illustrated by Fritz Kredel (1900-1973). We have information overload today. So much everything! You can talk to chatGPT for hours and yes—you’re further along, but the sheer amount of information, nevermind the incorrect information, can feel overwhelming. I like finite. Compressed! Edited. Like: Want to learn about birds? Here’s a wonderful 136-page 20-point font sized children’s book with a lively tone. And it will feel so complete in your hands. It’s got thick, heavy paper—the kind you can slide your thumbnail across and actually indent—and orange-spot colour line drawings with captions like “When ducks preen their feathers they are really putting on oil.”, “The gannet may dive straight down from a height of fifty feet.”, and “The wingspan of an albatross may be over 11 feet.” Chapter titles include “How Many Birds Are There?” and “The Oldest Bird In The World” and “The Wonders of a Feather.” Great questions, right? So: How many birds are there? Well, “nobody has actually counted every bird, of course, but people who study wild birds believe there are about one hundred billion of them in the whole world. Right here in the United States and Canada, there are around twelve or fifteen billion.” (Page 1) Now this book was published in 1955 so is that still true? We can return to researching online and find a 2019 study in Science showing that pesticide use and habitat loss has dropped North American bird populations by 3 billion since 1970 which they say is a 29% reduction! And don’t get me started on domestic house cats which kill 1 to 4 billion wild birds a year! Children’s books are a wonderful way to learn for all of us and a great reading accelerator. A great curiosity-scratch on all things birds.
5. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen (1938-2021). I was first turned onto this book years ago by Michael Harris whose book ‘Solitude’ (11/2018) has stuck with me over the years. (Check out the highlights on my favourite pages here!) If loneliness is “alone plus sad” then solitude is “alone plus happy” and I feel like that skill is harder than ever to build nowadays. How rarely are we truly alone these days? It seems like building resilience, mental toughness, is in relative short supply. (I wrote a whole book about building resilience too and you can read the first chapter of it right here.) Most of the things I suggest are around mental scripts (“Tell yourself a different story”) and creating new personal habits (“Two-Minute Mornings”, “Untouchable Days”) but another way to go about things would be for the pilot of the prop plane you’re riding shotgun in, from your recently divorced dad in Boston to your recently divorced mom in Canada, to have a sudden heart attack mid-flight and crash land the plane in the middle of the wilderness. You’re 13! And now you’re suddenly in the woods with bears, tornados, and a barrage of inner battles. A harrowing, riveting epic of children’s literature. The back says it’s for ages 10-14 but I, of course, recommend it for adults, too. (What’s up with “max” age dates on books?) A silver seal on the cover stamps it as a Newbery Honor Book and if you’re in the market for great kids book the ALA list of Newbery winners and honors is a great place to start.
6. Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto (Updated Edition) by Shawn Micallef (b. 1974), Illustrated by Marlena Zuber. Did you have a street paper, an “alt-weekly”, in your hometown? The Village Voice (New York), The Stranger (Seattle), The Georgia Straight (Vancouver), Good Times (Santa Cruz), The Coast (Halifax), Flagpole (Georgia), or (here in Toronto) a NOW or Eye Weekly? I used to love picking up those thick, full-colour, totally free papers, in their own metal boxes all over the city, chock-full of concert listings, album reviews, edgy cartoons, passionate diatribes, phone-sex ads, and Savage Love columns (which I notice is in its 26th year and now billed as "America's Longest Running Sex Advice Column"). Anyway, that frothy breeding ground is where much of this book originated. Shawn moved to Toronto from Windsor in 2000 and began flâneuring—“someone who wanders the city with the sole purpose of paying attention to it”—as, he says, a kind of informal thesis project after years of formal school. His little notes and emails to friends evolved into a column for Eye Weekly originally titled “Stroll” and then, later, “Psychogeography” (trying saying that with a mouth full of pebbles). After newspaper ads died and most alt-weeklies died with them, Micallef took up a job in 2012 for The Toronto Star where he continues to this day. His columns are always interesting and provide a great lens for seeing this city, the fourth-largest in North America. And now we have this updated book which is a true gift to anybody who loves to walk and who lives (or is visiting!) Toronto. This book adds colour, context, whimsy, and history to 31 different long-walks in and around the Toronto area from “CN Tower” to “Islands” to “Hydro Corridor” to “Rouge Park.” His charmingly erudite writing is a delight to read and he quotes novels, park plaques, and bits of arcane trivia throughout, which lets your mind wander as you wander with him. Like from Page 52 in “Toronto Islands”: “Visiting the islands during winter is a magical thing. There’s barely a lineup for the ferry, just some intrepid winter souls and island residents. Outside, on deck, the sound of the ferry pushing through chunks of ice is like a giant cocktail glass swirling. The skyscrapers pump out steam and the city hums, as if it’s collectively trying to keep warm.” With a giant pull-out colour map and little illustrations throughout from the talented Marlena Zuber. A must for all Toronto flâneurs and flâneurs-to-be.
7. Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o (1938-2025). “Nyokabi called him. She was a small, black woman, with a bold but grave face. One could tell by her small eyes full of life and warmth that she had once been beautiful. But time and bad conditions do not favour beauty. All the same, Nyokabi had retained her full smile – a smile that lit up her dark face.” That’s the opening paragraph of his 1964 debut novel by Pulitzer Prize nominated Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, who just died three months ago. Tight, spare language, but dressed into a slightly more abstract structure, we get a powerful story of a young boy named Njoroge who lives with his brother, father, two moms (his dad has two wives), in Kenya, right as it’s starting to decolonize. My mom was born in Nairobi in 1950 and I heard isolated tales of her childhood growing up in this brown, black, and white mixed-race country as it jostled towards independence. (I write about my mom’s story in the first chapter of my book on resilience.) This book continued to colour in many of the lines as it tells the story of Kenya from the view of the natives. After a slowish start, the book picks up about sixty pages in when an older brother with a grim disposition visits home and helps the community push towards a labor strike and from there emerge demonstrations, riots, trials, the Mau Mau uprising, lots of violence, attempted suicides, and a slowly dimming future for Njoroge. I haven’t read much (any?) African literature so this felt like a good place to start. (Got suggestions on what to read next?)
8. Neil's Reading Light Recommendation. There is no 8! Normally I close things off with a loot bag of links but this month I’ll share just one: A reading light! I put two of them in the picture above. We have about seven now. This is hands down the best reading light I’ve found and I’ve tried so many over the years: headbands, red lights, extendable-ET-neck things. I have no affiliation with whatever Chinese factory makes this light but we’ve come to love them and bought one for all our kids. Pack them in camp bags! Leave them under pillows! Stuff them in suitcases! It’s perfect: USB powered, no wires or cables (just needs one of those old white iPhone charging blocks with a USB hole in it), needs charging like twice a year, has three different lights (yellow, white, light blue), five brightnesses, a metal fold-out arm that you can attach to your book’s back cover, and even a little bendable head on top. Sometimes I just leave it lying on my chest and point it up at the book for that flashlight-under-the-blanket feel. (Doesn't it always feel good to read in that light? It makes reading a secret between you and the book somehow.) Anyway, we’ve never had a single one break, the buttons are super intuitive (no manual or need for one!), and it’s just … perfect. Here is the company website or links on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk. I collect zero affiliate or sponsor money from any links here or anywhere in my emails. If you want to support this endeavor (thank you!) ... I present a platter of my books! Just click the photo and send one to someone you love. I recommend the top two!)
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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - July 2025
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Hey everyone,
Hope you’ve had a great July.
It’s been hot, hot, hot in Toronto and Leslie and I have been soaking in some downtime with the kids. I’ve been in 22 cities so far this year for keynote speeches and podcasts so—per our family contract—I’m aiming for an offline, or at least more grounded, July and August. Swimming, sandcastles, sunsets, s'mores, stories, stars...
Of course July was also Canada Day so I published ‘Canada Is Awesome’ (HTML, PDF, audio, paper) and did a follow-up interview with 91-year-old former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien (Apple, Spotify, YouTube).
This month I found myself staying up late deep into the investigative journalism masterpiece of ‘Empire of AI’ by Karen Hao. My review, along with others I read this month, below.
Thanks for spending some time with me instead of the bots.
Let's get to it!
Neil
1. Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao. I have a love-hate relationship with AI. I love looking up "a baby Bok Choy recipe I can make in 7 minutes" but hate the homogenizing effect it’s seemingly having on writing ... on quality? ... on culture? I think I disagree with Rick Rubin when he says AI "supercharges creativity." Then again maybe I just don’t want to be supercharged by robots even if they are awesome? Could be my bias coming in. I admit I had little history, knowledge, or questions to help me wade through early thoughts on AI. But that’s where Karen Hao’s magisterial 496-page opus comes in. On the back cover Shoshanna Zuboff, who wrote my #1 book of 2023 ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ calls this a “heroic work” of “essential public education.” It is. Hao comes in asking questions like: What even is intelligence? Start there! Anyone know? Anyone? OK, so then what is … ‘artificial’ intelligence? Could it be a marketing term from the 50s? It could! And wait, what about … artificial ‘general’ intelligence? AGI? “I think it’s a ridiculous and meaningless term,” Sam Altman told The New York Times in 2023. "So I apologize that I keep using it." Bandied about like badminton birds but no consensus despite, no biggie, these terms underpinning billion-dollar contracts which are accelerating an arms race to build the most-fastest Manhattan-sized (!) data centres so we can scrape all of our collective human output and feed it back to us to potentially unemploy and/or garn us? But that’s my bias, that’s my bias, sorry, backtracking, backtracking. OK, so terms aren’t clear. Doesn’t matter! Because what is clear is everybody’s suddenly using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, whatever. Few months ago Leslie was helping her mom download chatGPT and I heard her say "I don’t even Google anything anymore!" Now my group chat with my oldest friends is filling up with AI images while one member of the group is laying off the staff at his 20-year-old animation company. What is going on? I don’t understand it. I am slow. Real time is too fast for me. This book slowed me down, helped me look back, and see all the heavy moving gears. Karen Hao gave us the first-ever company profile of OpenAI over five years ago in the MIT Technology Review and now she’s back with this engrossing, propulsive, illuminating portrait that traces the many tentacles of this emerging giant squid. I should mention the whole idea of how this book was made is somewhat antithetical to the rush-rush-rush of today with old-timey things like research teams and human fact-checkers. (In the Acknowledgements Hao thanks many sources who spoke to her “despite legal or other risks” along with Penguin Press’s team of lawyers as well as a deep four-person “fact-checking team” who “fastidiously combed through the draft, cross-checking the labyrinth of details against documents and sources, and stress-testing my word choices”.) So what’s her thesis? It’s in the title! AI is emerging like a new empire—like colonialist overlords stealing, taking, raping, pillaging—but on Page 413 Hao writes that she rejects "the dangerous notion that broad benefit from AI can only be derived from—indeed, will ever emerge from—a vision for the technology that requires the complete capitulation of our privacy, our agency, and our worth, including the value of our labor and art, toward and ultimately imperial centralization project.” Amen! In one vivid story we follow Hao to Kenya and hear about Mophat Okinyi who was left by his wife after a stint doing content moderation work for OpenAI—humans apparently still turning cranks in the basement of this thing!—which left him and his coworkers severely traumatized. There were “hundreds of thousands of grotesque text-based descriptions they needed to read and sort into categories of severity. Was it violence or extremely graphic violence, harassment or hate speech, child sexual abuse or bestiality?” Um. Yeah. It gets dark. Turns out when you scrape all the content on the Internet you get a lot of nasty stuff, too. Just a small negative externality? Mayyyybe. But then we go to Chile and read about what these new AI data centres are doing to people and animals hearing them hum from miles away. We go all over in this book! And then something obvious emerges: That to have the confidence, conviction, and charisma necessary to grow a company from nothing to everything you need to go against your original stated open spirit and purpose. “The most successful founders do not set out to create companies,” Sam Altman says. “They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.” Hao shares an excerpt from a 2018 interview with Tyler Cowan where Altman says it’s “impressive” that Napoleon Bonaparte was able to use the country’s national motto—“Liberté, egalité, fraternité”—to be endlessly reinterpreted to consolidate his own power. On Page 401 she shows Altman doing the same thing. How? Well, "in 2015, its mission meant being a nonprofit ‘unconstrained by a need to generate financial return' and open sourcing research… in 2016 it meant ‘everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it’s totally OK to not share the science'… in 2018 and 2019 it meant introducing a new capped profit structure to “marshal substantial resources", in 2022 it meant "racing as fast as possible to deploy chatGPT", and in 2024 Altman was saying "A key part of our mission is to put very capable AI tools in the hands of people for free (or at a great price)." It should be said Altman does not come out looking great here. Though there's a clear lack of connection between Altman and Hao—he evidently stopped talking to her after the 2020 profile—the stories she digs up may make you pause, grimace, or worry. She has an email from fellow co-founder Ilya Sutskever to Altman and Musk saying "We don't understand why the CEO title is so important to you. Your stated reasons have changed ... How does it connect to your political goals?" and there is a clear pattern of three organizations in a row of charmingly-deceitful behaviour that baffles or mystifies reports through seemingly hypocritical behaviour. As one example Hao reveals that Altman fake-positioned his exit from running Y Combinator (YC) as a strategic shift to Chairman when nobody running YC ever agreed or approved that and then, after he wrote about his new not-real title YC actually took the dramatic step of scrubbing his name completely from the post. Big news right!? Not when the next day you put out a press release saying you're now CEO of OpenAI! I ate up the history in this book. Because that's one thing on AI that won't change. It feels vital to learn it. Like how at Elon Musk’s 2013 birthday party in Napa a disagreement with Larry Page left Elon labeled a “speciesist” after Elon said AI surpassing human intelligence was an issue ... to the 2015 dinner party at Altman’s house where he and Elon hatched the concept of OpenAI. (Elon later said in a lawsuit that it was as if “Altman had mirrored everything Musk had ever said about the subject to win his trust.”). Then Elon’s departure, then mission creep, then a racing evolution. Bill Gates makes a couple industry-altering cameos. “The Divorce” is catalogued where a number of OpenAI employees revolted after OpenAI started taking private money and then disembarked en masse to begin rival Anthropic (who make Claude). Proclamations! Ramifications! A vast, sweeping, deep “how of history” book to help us understand and much-more-clearly see and witness the phenomenon of AI. Get it at a library, in audio, or get it from a bookstore. A powerful book offering clarity and truth.
2. Peterson Field Guides: Eastern Butterflies by Paul A. Opler and Vichai Malikul. I never really noticed butterflies until this year. I could identify a Monarch. That’s it! Just that one. I knew Monarchs were striking and elegant and wondrous and I’d seen a nature show talking about how they migrate to this sacred forest in Mexico where you might in one day and see something like this:
More recently I’d heard they don’t even migrate the whole way—it’s a multi-generational affair! The Monarchs overwintering in Mexico are actually the great-great-grandchildren (!) of the Monarchs we might see flying south. Then last year I walked through an alley in Toronto called “Mourning Cloak Lane” and looked up the Mourning Cloak butterfly and discovered that they overwinter in Canada. Really!
They hide in rocks and tree bark and enter hibernation as part of their 10 to 11 month long life-cycle … one of the longest of all butterflies! So I borrowed this field guide from my grandparents-in-law and have just picked up 'The ROM Field Guide to Butterflies of Ontario' (2014) and now I’m suddenly noticing butterflies everywhere. On people’s shoulders, fluttering above milkweed, floating above gardens. They’re so stunning, so fragile, so wild, so free. They’re so acrobatic, so otherworldly, so fleeting. When this guide was published in 1992 there were 522 known species of butterflies “east of the 100th meridian” (which in North America runs from around Winnipeg to Wichita to Mexico City) and on Page 4 Opler says he answers the question about what a butterfly even is by saying “Butterflies fly in the day, are brightly coloured, and have clubbed antenna.” Easy enough! Also helps differentiate from moths. He goes on to tell us if we’re in a “middle east” latitude (Toronto, New York, Chicago, Philly, Atlanta, etc) then “In early spring, as buds are just beginning to open, you can find Falcate Orangetips, the first whites, Spring Azures, Silvery Blues, elfins, duskywings, overwintered adults of Mourning Cloaks, tortoiseshells, and anglewings. Most swallowtails, brushfoots, and true skippers don’t begin their flights until late spring or early summer, while mid- to late summer is a time when you should expect hairstreaks, fritillaries, some skippers, and immigrants from further south.” Hairstreaks? Skippers? Duskywings? I love their names. I love their lives! Butterflies, along with some beetles and wasps, have four life stages. Most bugs have three (eggs, nymphs, adults) but butterflies go egg, larva (caterpillars), pupa (chrysalis), adults. I have long, long believed anything that can grow wings is awesome. But I haven’t really noticed butterflies till now. As always: The more you look the more you see. They fly away quickly so I’m often stuck thinking “it was dark blue, with white spots on the edge of the wings…” before I can look it up. But starting somewhere! Butterfly-watchers / lepidopterists—please share any thoughts, advice, or favourites. Just reply to this email!
3. Time Is A Mother by Ocean Vuong. I read and loved 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' by Ocean Vuong and thought I’d flip open his more recent book of his poetry. It is … different. Apparently the poems are about Vuong’s loss of his mother in 2019 and the emotions he felt during the pandemic. He calls this his “proudest book” and yeah it has some of that similar chilly and poignant emotional breeze. But sometimes, for me, the aesthetic complexity didn’t quite land. Either way: this is a book that forces you to slow down, to try and take words in slowly, and for that reason alone I found it meditative. These are poems you could easily read again right away, see something new, then read them again. It's around 30 poems over 113 pages and here’s the opening 10 lines of the poem “The Last Prom Queen From Antarctica” from Page 36 to give you a vibe: “It’s true I’m all talk & a French tuck / but so what. Like the wind, I ride / my own life. Neon light electric / in the wet part of roadkill / on the street where I cut my teeth / on the good sin. I want to / take care of our planet / because I need a beautiful / graveyard. It’s true I’m not a writer / but a faucet underwater. When the flood comes / I’ll raise my hand so they know / who to shoot. The sky flashes. The sea" ... now do you want to keep going? That's only a third of it! If yes, you’ll like the poems here. I loved ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ and may pick up his new novel ‘The Emperor of Gladness’ next. Vuong is a writer that pushes you somewhere else.
4. The Second Herman Treasury by Jim Unger. I think maybe that AI book crisped my brain a little given how I found myself itching for the balm of butterflies, poetry, and 80s cartoons afterwards. Backstory on this one was Leslie and I were driving down the main street of Bracebridge, Ontario this month and spotted a used bookstore called The Owl Pen. I just love used bookstores. Malcolm Gladwell and I talked about used bookstores and he helped teach me they sort of pull together the minds—attics? basements?—of a town to say something interesting about how they think and what they value. When Leslie and I walked in we walked past a huge shelf of frayed blue hardcover ‘Hardy Boys’ and frayed yellow hardcover ‘Nancy Drews’ before hitting a little collection on local and indigenous histories and then discovering an incredible children’s section at the back where I picked up a giant hardcover picture book 'The Call of the Wild' by Jack London (08/2023). But then! It happened! I turned a corner and looked up high and way up on the top of a bookshelf to the ceiling and high above me was a stack of ‘Herman’ treasuries—one even signed!—for like… thirty dollars total? Truly priceless:
Do you know ‘Herman’? Did you read ‘Herman’? When I was growing up there was an identical pile on the back of the toilet at my friend Mike’s bathroom. (I confess I miss the days of communal “everybody reading from the same pile” before screens stepped in to individualize our feeds.) If so ... then you know. And if not ... welcome. Welcome to ‘Herman’! We’re glad you're here. Herman, btw, isn’t a character but… a vibe. Unger himself says: “His wife’s named Herman. The dog’s Herman. The kid is Herman, too. Herman is not anybody’s name. Herman is a state of mind.” And what's the state? Some combination of acidity, anger, and absurdity that uniquely pokes at life. Here's Page 88 from the second treasury for a taste:
The strip ran 1975 to 1992 and was syndicated across 600 newspapers at its peak. It’s like some special blend of Mitch Hedberg one-liners and the subreddit r/showerthoughts with only the occasional strip fading into a lost politically very-incorrect cultural history. Maybe the strip was some kind of precursor to that absurdist- philosophizing popularized by ‘The Far Side’ by Gary Larson (1979-1995, 1900 newspapers at its peak) or ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ by Bill Watterson (1985-1995, 2400 newspapers at its peak). I say one of the best things you can do in your life is treat yourself to a pile of ‘Hermans’. Helps unfry the brain a little.
5. Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty. When I flew down to New York last year to sit with my favourite editor Amy Einhorn, I mentioned to her how Leslie loves so many of her books—‘The Help’, 'American Dirt', 'Big Little Lies' (and *cough* 'The Book of Awesome')—and then when I got home there was a package of some of Amy’s newest with a letter to Leslie! Let’s cut over to Leslie’s Pick now: “This book caught me from the beginning with its opening few chapters of a woman on a delayed flight hauntingly telling everyone on board (even children in mother’s arms!!) how and when they are going to die!! I sometimes got a bit lost as every chapter switched from one person's perspective to the next. Right along with the characters, I debated in my mind whether the ‘death lady’s’ predictions were psychic or crazy and reflected on fate, agency, and my own sacred short life which will ultimately end in death just like all of ours.”
6. The Wall In The Middle Of The Book by Jon Agee. I have loved Jon Agee since 'Otto' (01/2022) and on a recent summer library load up found this book from 2018 which according to Goodreads seems his most popular. “There is a wall in the middle of this book” we are told in the opening two pages and, sure enough, there’s a thick brick wall with a tiny knight and a ladder on one side and a fearsome-looking rhino and tiger on the other. We are told that the wall “is a good thing” because it “protects this side of the book from the other side.” And then, in subtle shifts, the safe side of the book starts filling with water and man-eating fish while a giant ogre emerges on the other side. In a climactic scene the giant ogre lifts the knight over the wall and we discover that the scary side of the book is really ... fun. Playfully skewers reality versus expectations and the whole grass is always greener adage. The book feels both minimalist in its prose and art but also maximalist in the sense that on every page about six different things are changing so it’s fun to reread and spot the multiple braided plotlines. You can have the book read to you right here on YouTube.
7. Learning To Sail: A No-Nonsense Guide For Beginners Of All Ages by Basil Mosenthal. Can you learn to sail from a book? No! You cannot. I could not sail. Then I read this book. Then I … still could not sail. But if you count reading the book as forward action then it helped me get to the next step which was sitting in a sailboat and holding a rope ("mainsheet") and holding a stick ("tiller") and pulling them and letting them go to move the sail and move the boat. Am I good at sailing? No! Nowhere close. But I’ve started. And that’s usually the hardest part. As we always say: It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking rather than think yourself into a new way of acting. What's something new you want try or start doing next month?
8. Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds in Song by Les Beletsky (featuring audio from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology). Imagine you had a secret giant room in your house that was full of trees and on those trees were 250 birds from around North America that you had trained to sing on command. American Goldfinch! Roseate Spoonbills! Cactus Wrens! And you could just point to any bird and they will start singing for you. That’s what this book feels like. It was my Father’s Day gift this year from my family. They know me well. We all love scrolling through the side buttons and listening to the song. Great one for any birder in your life.
9. There is no 9! Just our regular loot bag of links. My friend Maria Popova has published her incredible Bird Cards or what she calls “100 Divinations for Uncertain Days”. Douglas Rushkoff asks if AI is the next Dumbwaiter. Thomas Pueyo tells us the fundamental problem with urbanism. Rich Roll does psychedelics. Marc Maron has a great chat Sarah Silverman. (And Sarah's podcast is back, too!) Megan O’Rourke writes about the seductions of AI for the writer’s mind. George Saunders gives us a lesson on grace and talks literary allusions. Date Night movies: Leslie and I loved 'Friendship' (hilarious debut from Andrew DeYoung) and 'Materialists' (wonderful new flick from Celine Song after her brilliant 'Past Lives'!). And this astonishing New Yorker article on the silent solar revolution convinced Leslie and I to get solar panels on our roof!
Remember: You are what you eat. And you are what you read. Keep turning that page ... and I'll talk to you soon.
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 - June 2025
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Was your June overwhelming, too?
We had our last day of school up here yesterday and it was a sweaty finish with approximately zero air-conditioned public schools and a blistering heat wave in the 40s/110s (Celsius/Fahrenheit).
But we made it!
This coming Tuesday is July 1st—Canada Day!—and I just made a little 78-page full-colour hardcover called ‘Canada Is Awesome.’ I’m proud of it! The publishers all said no—“Not enough runway", “Too timely”, “Doesn’t fit our vision”—so I did it myself. I am posting the whole thing for free online and selling it at cost.
But lots more to share so let’s get to it!
Neil
P.S. Invite others to join us here.
1. Canada is Awesome: A Little Book About a Big Country by Neil Pasricha (b. 1979). I think it was this tweet back in February that really got me going:
I had a visceral reaction. It was twisted into prolonged news coverage about Trump’s “51st state” comments, Justin Trudeau’s “not a snowball’s chance in hell” reaction, and much snarky online dialogue that followed. I love Canada! Lived here my whole life. I spent one summer in New York, a couple years in Boston, but the rest of my 45 years I’ve lived in Canada. I grew up with my dad telling my sister and me that we were lucky to be here. “The land of opportunity!” he’d say. And he would know. My dad was born in a village in Punjab, India in 1944. His mom died when he was 3 and he grew up sharing a small bedroom with three brothers and a sister. Twenty-two years later, while doing his Masters in Nuclear Physics at the University of New Delhi, he went to the library and looked up a list of the best countries in the world. He didn’t speak the language of the Scandinavian countries so he went down the list a little and applied to Canada and the US. He got the letter back from Canada first. My dad’s sense of wonder was this sunbeam over my childhood. It has resulted in this feeling about Canada—how we live, what we value, what that represents—which I’ve tried to articulate in a little book. This is a complete passion project. There’s probably good reason the publishers said no. Stocking tiny little books, about tiny little things, is ... hard. Penguin Random House, Simon&Schuster, House of Anansi? None of them wanted to print it. But I wanted to. So I did. You can get it right here on Amazon.ca (hardcover or paperback), right here on Amazon.com (hardcover or paperback), here as a free and complete Audiobook (Spotify, Apple, YouTube), and on Canada Day I'll post the whole thing on my blog and share a free downloadable PDF, too. Post the whole thing? Bad way to sell books! I know. And I don’t care. I made the book for the people who want it and am selling it for exactly what it costs to produce it. I make precisely zero dollars and zero cents on every sale. You can see a picture of the hardcover in the photo above, see the page I made for it here, and here’s some inside pages, too:
In this era of political and algorithmic whiplashing I wanted to create a sense of grounding around my favourite country. Last year more and more articles showed Canada is still tops in the world for the best places to move—best places to live. This little book is my attempt to explain why. I hope you like it.
2. Learning All the Time: How small children begin to read, write, count, and investigate the world, without being taught by John Holt (1923-1985). I didn’t know this book existed and I didn’t know I needed it! But it does and I did. Big thank you to Ginny Yurich (“yer-itch”) of 1000 Hours Outside and ‘Homeschooling’ for introducing me to this book on our long walk around frigid Toronto with Leslie a few months ago. Once you flip through this book you start seeing how your children are learning everything, on their own, by themselves, and you start seeing your job as removing obstacles and staying quiet and calm like a tree so they keep going. Like right now my 6-year-old is learning to read and right from the beginning John reminds us that “whether you’re a ‘gifted’ five-year-old or a terrified, illiterate twelve-year-old, trying to read something new is a dangerous adventure. You may make mistakes, or fail, and so feel disappointment or shame, or anger, or disgust. Just in order to get started on this adventure, most people need as much comfort, reassurance, and security as they can find. The typical classroom, with other children ready to point out, correct, and even laugh at every mistake … is the worst possible place for a child to begin.” This book came out in 1989 and is an accessible and warm place to start for anybody interested in what might today be called unschooling. A real treasure.
3. My Years As Prime Minister by Jean Chrétien (b. 1934). Over the last couple months I’ve been to Dallas, Vancouver, Las Vegas, Barcelona, Ottawa, Chicago, Dallas again, Ranchos Palos Verde, and then I got home and there were a couple calls and suddenly I had one more trip to make. So I put on a suit and tie and flew back to Ottawa to meet the 91-year-old man my wife Leslie calls “the grandfather of Canada.” The Right Honourable Jean Chrétien is one of the longest-serving Prime Ministers in Canadian history and led three successive majority terms as leader of the Liberal Party from 1993 to 2003. He famously said no to joining the US in the Iraq War (solidifying Canada’s independence on foreign policy), signed the Kyoto Protocol (committing Canada to its first-ever international environmental agreement), established the Oceans Act (helping Canada become the first country to prioritize ocean health), created the Clarity Act (to establish terms for future secession movements after the Quebec Referendum of 1995), and led Operation Yellow Ribbon to help 40,000 Americans in the air and traveling through Canada on September 11, 2001 and beyond. If you don’t know Jean Chrétien I recommend starting with the room-rousing speech he gave this past March on the night Mark Carney became Prime Minister. If you do know him, or just want to know him better, read this book. Chrétien has an incredible way of getting to the nub of an issue, talking about it in a plainspoken way, and using humor and charm to get what he needs to get done done. Like at the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec which he recounts on page 292: “The summit coincided with a small but irritating border dispute in which American potato growers managed to obtain a ban on imports from Prince Edward Island after the discovery of a harmless ‘potato wart’ on the produce from one remote farm. So I gave instructions that PEI potatoes were to be served to President Bush at every meal. During the last lunch, at a NAFTA trilateral meeting held in the Citadel looking over the St. Lawrence River and north to the Laurentian Hills, Colin Powell turned to Bush and, translating the French menu, said, ‘He’s still serving us PEI potatoes.’ // ‘You see George,’ I said, ‘you’ve been eating PEI potatoes for two days now, and you’re still alive. So tell your guys in Washington that they’re wrong.’ Apparently he did, because the problem was quickly solved.” This 2007 book pulses with endless anecdotes and stories like this one and his trademark Canadian drive, grit, and determination are on full display. I am excited to share that the Right Honourable Jean Chrétien will be my guest on the next chapter of 3 Books. Look up to the sky and it will drop when the moon is fully full. When I got to his office his assistant told me “We don’t do hour-long interviews … ever.” Well, I guess he’s now done one! This was a true honour and I can't wait to share it with you. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube to listen when the chapter is released.
4. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. You’re playing Super Mario Kart for Super Nintendo. The original! And then this screen pops up. Who did you pick?
Let me guess: Koopa or Toad? Me too. Best all-rounders! Peach or Yoshi were fine. Mario or Luigi in a pinch. But no way anyone took DK or Bowser. Even though they had the highest top speeds! Acceleration? Too slow! Control? Too hard! For novice drivers sliding off Ghost Valleys they were a nightmare. But I will tell you this: Once, when I was at my cousin’s birthday party, he had this friend over who was some kind of Mario Kart savant and he actually played with DK or Bowser. And he won! Every time! Slow acceleration, careful steering, incredible top speed. That’s DK. That’s Bowser. And that’s ‘Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore’ by Robin Sloan. This book was a big surprise to me! I read and loved ‘Moonbound’ (8/2024) when it came out last year. My friend Michael Bungay-Stanier texted me saying he loved it and since I love Michael’s mind that was enough. The book blew me away and I put it in my best books of the year. ‘Moonbound’ was my Robin Sloan opener. Then I went back to read this Robin Sloan classic (which, btw, boasts 213,568 Goodreads ratings to Moonbound’s still-pretty-high-otherwise 3,611). The back of Mr. Penumbra features the remarkably rare blurber 1-2 punch of Roxane Gay (“...eminently enjoyable, full of warmth and intelligence.”) and George Saunders (“It's a lot of fun, a real tour de force.”). And the book opens with a captivating scene: “Lost in the shadows of the shelves, I almost fall off the ladder. I am exactly halfway up. The floor of the bookstore is far below me, the surface of a planet I’ve left behind.” The thing you don’t realize is that he’s up, like, stories. Hapless Clay Jannon has just lost his design job for a San Francisco bagel company started by ex-Googlers. Why? Well, because of “the great food-chain contraction that swept through America in the early twenty-first century,” of course. Anyway, he needs a job. So he starts at this random downtown bookstore located beside a strip club. The bookstore has few customers. Like almost none. And the customers seem to ask for their next books in codes. The pace starts accelerating. And accelerating. And accelerating. Soon you’re on sudden cross-country flights and in dark chatrooms and creeping through subterranean lairs and having lunch in Google cafeterias and talking about secrets to immortality and I tell you there are just enough light feathery turns to keep you in this wonderfully bubbly type of nerd-out suspense. Early on the book has a short-chapter-acceleration that feels kind of like ‘Angels and Demons’ by Dan Brown or ‘The Martian’ by Andy Weir. The whole thing is some kind of magic trick and a perfect volley to the stunning ‘Moonbound’ afterwards. To get a taste for Robin Sloan try reading his blog (like his February post on AI called “Is it okay?”) or join his wonderfully geeky newsletter appearing exactly every 29 and a ½ days. The world needs more Robin Sloan!
5. “The Smartphones Haven’t Defeated Us. Yet.” By Jonathan Haidt, Will Johnson, and Zach Rausch. I grew up with one phone in the kitchen. Over there. On the wall. A benign presence. We had to make sure we had a quarter in our pockets when we got dropped at the mall so we could call home later. Today I’ve had a smartphone for, geez, 15 years, and I’ve barely felt the slow sponging and soaking in of our now-omnipresent phone-everywhere culture. Our phones have pulverized free time, wandering time, daydreaming time. They have decimated solitude, quiet, and space. We have become more frazzled, frenetic, and mentally fractured. We have the highest rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness we’ve ever seen. It’s time to email our politicians! I’ve just emailed my Canadian Member of Parliament (find yours here!) and Ontario Member of Provincial Parliament (find yours here!) to share this article and ask for a phone ban in classrooms. It’s a start. The link above—and right here!—is a link you can share with anyone. We need to unite to ask for schools to be phone-free from bell to bell. Unconvinced? Read this article. Read it! It’s written by Jon Haidt, author of ‘The Anxious Generation’ (4/2024), and it summarizes the current state of things. We have a nice little teetering right now but need a concerted push for it to tip. Ten states have now enacted laws to make their schools phone-free. Red states, blue states, doesn’t matter. We're looking for phone-free schools—from bell to bell. This is above political divides. When even Gen Z itself is saying they “express regret about having access to many of the most popular social media platforms” and in new surveys many parents say they “wish social media had never been invented,” it is time. Let’s bring back childhood! Read this article, share this article, contact your politician. Thank you, Jon Haidt, for your strength and galvanizing leadership. (Btw, if you haven’t read ‘The Anxious Generation’ and want the quick version here are Part 1 and Part 2 of my favourite pages from the book.) Let's do this!
6. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (b. 1969). I recently made a video and podcast of ‘5 Beach Books to Stretch Your Mind.’ This is one book on my list! (I’ll leave the other four a surprise and you can get the whole chat on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.) OK, let me say up front: I think David Mitchell is my favourite living novelist and I think this is the book of his to start with. Sure, he’s a lot more famous for ‘Cloud Atlas’ (6/2019) published in 2004—partly because of the (very good!) Wachowski-directed Tom Hanks and Halle Berry movie it inspired—but I think that book is too genre-bendy to begin with. So if you go with ‘Black Swan Green,’ his 2006 bildungsroman, instead then it will prime you just perfectly for the Mitchellverse, the term David Mitchell fans use to describe the overarching ever-expanding relationships between all his books and characters. Let’s start with the plot: “It’s a dank January in the Worcestershire village of Black Swan Green and thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor—covert stammerer and reluctant poet—anticipates a stultifying year in the deadest village on Earth. But Jason hasn’t reckoned with a junta of bullies, simmering family discord, the Falklands War, an exotic Belgian emigre, a threatened gypsy invasion and the caprices of those mysterious entities known as girls.” Junta of bullies? Mitchell’s turns of phrase always delight. The plot moves, the narrator is entrancing, and within a couple of pages you fall right into being a 13-year-old overthinking nerdy boy. (I, uh, could relate.) From page 4: “Moron’s my height and he’s okay but Jesus he pongs of gravy. Moron wears ankle-flappers from charity shops and lives down Drugger’s End in a brick cottage that pongs of gravy too.” The paragraph continues and expands into this remarkable history of his friends nicknames, friend nickname origins, and friend nickname rankings. This is a book I wish would go on forever and one I have on my permanent reread list. ‘Black Swan Green’ just glimmers like a diamond.
7. Playtown: Emergency: A Lift-The-Flap Book by Roger Priddy. OK, now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick. Over to you, Les: “We were first gifted the original ‘Playtown’ when our oldest turned two and it has been a family favourite since. Neil and I almost have the text memorized, the flaps are tattered (especially the one where someone is caught using the toilet on the train!), and each kid has their favourite page (airport, construction site, zoo, or main street). We’ve read that one a LOT but not as many times as we’ve read ‘Playtown: Emergency.’ Our youngest son went through a good period of about eight months where this was the book he wanted to read EVERY SINGLE NIGHT (he also likes to wear the exact same clothes every day—he was a tiger for several months, then a skeleton for a month, and now he wears a full soccer kit all day every day including shin pads and knee high socks in 32-degree humidity). Repetition and control seem to be big things for him? Maybe it’s being the youngest of four, maybe it’s being a deeply feeling child, maybe it’s because the world is a big and confusing place and reading the same gosh darn book every night at least gives him one predictable part of the day. And so, the other day, when he asked for this old favourite again, it was clear to me he needed some comfort and familiarity, some reassurance that each problem has a solution, that each question has an answer. And that’s what ‘Playtown Emergency’ does. It’s not overly profound—in fact I’ve often wished there was a bit more complexity like maybe a second flap behind each emergency worker showing them at home thinking about hopes or fears—but it does what it does really well. Which is give young readers a window into what happens at a hospital, what types of fire vehicles are used, and what are some different types of rescue teams. It makes the world feel understandable. It opens conversation about when we’ve been to the hospital or how there are helpers all around and it makes the fear and excitement of emergencies (are injury stories also a favourite around your dinner table!?) something to connect over after a busy day. This book gives us all the feeling that there are some predictable, simple, “lift the flap” explanations in this loud and chaotic world we live in.” (Note: This review has been added to Leslie’s Picks.)
8. Minnow: Issue 2, Winter/Spring 2025. I’m back into zines! It happened suddenly. Do you have a favourite zine? Or just one you recommend? When I was part of a six-person junta of 16-year-olds co-founding my high school newspaper we designed it as a zine and called it ‘Headrush.’ (Shoutout to 'Headrush' co-founders Michelle Jayakumar, Garry Liu, Lawny Graham, Tanya Hunter, and Romi Raina.) We put it together and hawked it in hallways with a sour key for fifty cents. Give us your quarters, we’ll give you our zine. I just loved zines. Their accessibility, earnest amateurness, their fine-pointed focus, their screaming passion, their manifesto-cum-chapbook-cum-samizdat type energy. They’re also super skinny! So easy to read. A fat zine is no zine! I was having lunch at Mi Madre’s down in Austin, Texas with Austin Kleon a couple years ago and he gave me a copy of his zine called ‘Read Like An Artist.’ I loved it! He’s posted it online. And more recently Robin Sloan (of the aforementioned ‘Mr. Penumbra’s’) has gotten into zines. He’s started making them! For himself. And selling them right here! He says he wants them to carry the spirit of “energy and ephemerality.” I love that. He’s even changed his biography online from “writer” to “writer, printer, and manufacturer” zine-infusing himself! So, anyway, yeah, it was in this spirit, this zine-open spirit, that I stumbled upon a shelf of zines at a local coffee shop. The cover for ‘Minnow’ caught me as it was focused on “conservation in the Great Lakes region and species often overlooked.” I bought it started flipping and was met with a 7-page article called “Queer Ecology” with stunning photos of Northern green frogs and Jack-in-the-Pulpit plants (which can both change their sex!) and then met a local group of salamanders that are “entirely female and reproduce without having sex.” Okay! Sure! I kept flipping and learned all about the fascinating Eastern hognose snake (and learned I should befriend and respect it rather than fear it) and then met a local community group called "Water Watchers" who self-formed in Wellington, Ontario 18 years ago after a big company moved in and started draining their lakes for bottled water. (An industry, I learned, which uses 10 billion [!] litres of oil a year in Canada alone.) I kept flipping and learned about the plight of the chattering Chimney Swifts whose population has declined 90% in Ontario due to less old growth forests with giant dead hollowed trees and more recently a lot less ... wait for it ... chimneys. Ultimately this zine gave me that exact energetic ephemerality I love from zines and zine culture. Here's a couple other zines I picked up from Hard Feelings, the downtown Toronto mental health centre and bookstore run by the incredible Kate Scowan:
Bold! Strong! Passionate! Economical! Long live zines. Reply and let me know if you have a favourite zine I should check out. And for those who want to make their own zine check out this great resource from Austin Kleon.
9. Straight from the Heart by Jean Chrétien. Another Jean Chrétien book? Yes! The man has four memoirs. But this one is some kind of museum treasure that glows in new light today. It was written in 1985—eight years before Chrétien came to power as Prime Minister. So, wait, a head of state memoir written before being head of state? Arm of state? Leg of state? Kind of, yeah. But let's remember Jean Chrétien was politically cooking by then and had been for a few decades. He was a Member of Parliament under Lester P. Pearson when they made the Canadian flag in 1967. (Do my top 3 books in the photo above look sort of Canadian-flaggy to you? It’s the little things.) Then, as he recounts here, he had just finished serving as Minister after Minister after Minister under Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and even helped patriate the Canadian Constitution and draft the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Jean Chrétien tells us his story of being born the 18th of 19th children (“In those days God decided how many kids people had”) in Shawinigan Falls, Quebec, a blue-collar French-speaking paper mill town on the river. “We lived in a brick house with a larger garden in which my mother grew vegetables, strawberries, rhubarb...” He drops occasional nuggets of early wisdom like on page 67 when he intones, “The public is moved by mood more than logic, by instinct more than reason” and recounts Canadian history with his knack for simile and metaphor around even tense issues. Like Trudeau’s famous invocation in 1973 of the War Measures Act after a Canadian politician was slain by the FLQ, Chrétien writes: “We had a hell of a dilemma. Since there was no law that covered precisely this type of national emergency we were left with the terrible-sounding and extensive War Measures Act. I used to describe the dilemma this way: you want to transport a refrigerator, and you only have a bicycle and a van. You won’t get very far on a bicycle, but using a big van for such a little project will look silly.” (Btw, I was somewhat fascinated to learn that the way Trudeau disarmed the FLQ by “allowing the FLQ manifesto to be read on television and letting the terrorists leave for Cuba” which, according to Chrétien, “destroyed political blackmail for a long time in Canada, because Trudeau did not bend farther.) His examination of the Trudeau years is fascinating from “Trudeaumania,” a Canadian cultural phenomenon people still discuss, but, according to Chrétien, four years later “no one remembered that. The people only saw the downturn in the economy and the flashy guy with the long hair and a beautiful young wife, and the intellectuals turned on him.” What next? Out forever? Nope! He wins a majority, then another, then another, and goes on to be Prime Minister for over FIFTEEN years! When you hit 91 years old your life is full of history and this book is a great place to start. You can also (of course) check out the wondrous speech Chrétien made earlier this year and (of course!) my upcoming podcast with him which will appear on the exact minute of the Buck Moon.
10. There is no 10! Just our regular loot bag of links. First up, I made a podcast on ‘5 Beach Books to Stretch Your Mind.’ I go deep explaining them differently than usual (and four of them aren’t in this list) so check it out if you’re looking for a great summer read. What else? Tyrese Haliburton’s inspiring post after tearing his Achilles at the end of the NBA Finals. Brilliant Balaji reminding us AI doesn’t do end-to-end. Of course preceded by Sam Altman’s blog post on ‘The Gentle Singularity’ (and Claude’s 1-sentence summary of it). Nick Cave answers the question, “Are you a natalist?” Ken Jennings riffs on how Jeopardy! could “save our republic.” Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Carol Cadwalladr (who exposed Facebook/Cambridge Analytics) on “the dark lord of Silicon Valley.” Cal Newport asks if we’re too concerned about social media. And you know you're Canadian if you're salivating right now.
Remember: You are what you eat. And you are what you read. Keep turning that page ... and I'll talk to you soon.
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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - May 2025
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Reading is under attack!
And yet: we remain. The resistance! We may not finish books. But we start them! We buy them. We borrow them. We trade them. We open them. We read them. We pace, we press, we plod, we push. We use systems, we cultivate habits, and we read, dammit—we read.
Scroll down to the pic for reflections on the books I read this month or if you want to chill with me in the sidewalk lawn chairs before stepping into the shop here are this month’s “Letters”!
Okay, in response to my April 2025 Book Club Michael H. writes:
Thank you, this is actually an email I look forward to getting. I think I pick up at least one new book from this list every month. I love the challenge to be open to things that are outside of my ‘algorithm.’
Ha! Me too, Michael. As Doug Miller said to us in Chapter 99 from his bookstore in Toronto’s Koreatown, “That's what's amazing about a bookstore: you find stuff you're not looking for. Amazon, you find stuff you're looking for.”
Kelly P. writes:
I'm a quiet follower but feel compelled to let you know I love seeing what you're reading. I'm going to go read that Atlantic article. ‘Educated’ by Tara Westover has stuck with me too. Keep em coming! I too like to share what I read with my modest personal following of friends, colleagues, and neighbors...
Love it, Kelly! And totally—just telling people what you’re reading is such a great reading accelerator. Whether you post on Goodreads (I do!), send emails to friends (I do!), or just obnoxiously prattle on about books all the time to anyone who will listen (I do!), it all works.
OK, and let's close this month with Jennifer A. from the UK:
Hi Neil, I added ‘Raising Calm Kids In A World of Worry’ to my list but, recently, I have realised that I have almost outgrown parenting books. My kids are autistic and so many of the strategies outlined in mainstream parenting books just cannot work in our household, making me feel a total failure. I used to think that, if I read the right book and followed its formula exactly, all would be well. My bubble kind of burst when I went to see Dr. Laura Markham (‘Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids’) speak at an event in London. She had the audience in the palm of her hand, we were drinking in every word. Then it was time for questions. "How do I get my child to eat fruit?" "Just make sure you don't have any sweet treats in the house, and then they will have no choice and start eating fruit." It was as if the spell she had over the room was broken - it wasn't like we hadn't tried all these things, it's not as if people snack only for hunger! In any other situation than parenting, starving someone into doing what you want would be a criminal offence. After that, I have been a little more sceptical about parenting books and now I just try to figure out what works for my children as well as getting outside professional help for them. Other people might have some ideas but you have to be the expert on your children. Thank you for your book club letters - I imagine they take quite some time to craft. Take care and to everyone, have faith in your parenting abilities!
Wow! Thank you so much for sharing, Jennifer. So nice to hear from you. Leslie wrote that review and she happens to be sitting beside me on the couch right now! She shares back:
I totally hear you. You do not sound anywhere close to a failure but more like an INCREDIBLE parent in that you know the ultimate, most important truth—only the parent themselves can know what is best for their child. And as you say tuning into that intuition and rising above the noise of the parenting world is really all we can do. One of my favourite parenting quotes is from Brené Brown who said, "Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting.” Feels like a deep calming exhale to remind myself of that, hopefully it has a similar effect on you!
OK!
As always I absolutely love your letters (just reply to this email and send me one!) and I absolutely love your phone calls (call me at 1-833-READ-A-LOT!).
I can’t reply to all but I do my best to read and listen to everyone one. And, as always, if I use your letter or your voicemail please reply with your address so I can sign and mail you a book—you pick!—as a way to say thanks.
AND NOW!
Let's head inside...
Neil
1. For God, Country & Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It by Mark Pendergrast (b. 1948). First up: Yes, Coca-Cola contained cocaine. From 1885 to 1905, actually. That was when the company published the pamphlet “What Is It? Coca-Cola: What It Is” praising how cocaine “makes one active, vigorous, brilliant, and able to accomplish a great deal of tasks easily.” But, of course, coca leaves from Peru contained just one of the two key ingredients immortalized in the name with the other being the kola nut from Ghana, which provided caffeine. Cocaine plus caffeine? Yes, but importantly no alcohol, which helped the “dope” (what people called Coca-Cola for years) skitter around Atlanta’s incoming prohibition laws. Who came up with Coca-Cola? The book opens with a vivid scene of inventor John Pemberton (1831-1888) shooting morphine. He had suffered a sabre wound to the chest in the Civil War and, like over 400,000 (!) veterans, became addicted to morphine to ease the pain. (Evidently they called it “Soldier’s Disease” back then.) So coca leaves plus kola nuts: Is that the secret formula? Well, no, there’s a lot more, and it wasn't exactly secret. In fact it’s published right here on Wikipedia and on page 490 of the book:
Not so easy to brew in your kitchen though, right? The book explains that the reason Coca-Cola’s recipe became secret was precisely because of how not-secret it was. Pemberton’s recipe travelled far and wide and for most of the company’s first few decades was endlessly imitated. But then the guy who bought Coca-Cola (through potentially nefarious means) decided to make it secret afterwards, setting up a complex series of unmarked boxes with coded numbers to slowly hide and then (some say) alter the recipe. By 1959 the company president was saying Coca-Cola was just “a meaningless but fanciful alliterative name.” Today Coca-Cola is the world’s most widely distributed product, available in more than two hundred countries—more than the United Nations membership. And would you believe that “coke” is the second “most universally recognized word on earth” (#1 is OK). Coca-Cola history is like this mirrory reflection of American history and capitalism’s history. The drink “helped to alter not only consumption patterns but attitudes toward leisure, work, advertising, sex, family, life, and patriotism.” It’s important. And big. Really big! In fact, I just looked it up and there is no “older-bigger” drink company … ever. No “older-bigger” food company, either. I only found three “older-bigger” companies period (Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, American Express.) Last year Coca-Cola made $47,100,000,000 and (including bottlers) employed over 700,000 people. To pull off the feat of being around 145 years (!) and being endlessly “within arm’s reach of desire” there is much Shakespearean drama. I mean, things just don’t last that long without some stories for the ages. From “Bottle It” (the smartest-dumbest contract ever) to “New Coke” (with incoming CEO asking sixty-year (!) Coca-Cola head “Mr. Bob” for his blessing on his deathbed) all the way to the 8-page “Coca-Cola Magic” Appendix which distills 35 business lessons from the company—this adds up to an exquisitely researched and epically brilliant masterwork on one of the most astounding organizations of all time. This is the mother of all Harvard Business Review case studies and clearly took most of a lifetime to put together. (I'll leave Atlanta native Pendergrast’s fascinating personal relationship to the company, revealed in the preface, as a little surprise.) There were several times I found myself drinking a Coca-Cola while reading the book and just pausing to stare at the bubbling black liquid in awe. Rollicking, unbiased, eye-opening, informative, magisterial, magical, unforgettable.
2. The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map by Alex Hutchinson. It was six or seven years ago when I was a “celebrity author” at the Toronto Public Library’s annual black tie charity gala. At the table next to me was another young author named Alex who shook my hand with a big smile and told me he had recently read my ‘Rose Rose Thorn Bud’ article in The Toronto Star. Both of us were relative no-names who were disappointing the high-rollers expecting to sit next to Margaret Atwood. I picked up Alex’s book ‘Endure’ soon after and enjoyed his conversation about it with Rich Roll. Flash forward to 2025 and I’m walking through Type on Queen West and I see ‘The Explorer’s Gene’ on the front table. It's Alex! He’s back! His next book! I pick it up and the subtitle draws me in: “Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map.” I relate to the first two! Third one, not so much. Cover pic of a guy cross-country skiing on a mountain summit? Definitely not! But I buy it and reconnect immediately with Alex’s winsome, accessible genius. (Not many people have the incredible combo of a Master's in Journalism from Columbia and a PhD in Physics from Cambridge!) He wins me over right at the epigraph from Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s ‘Physiologie du goùt’ which reads: “To say that we should not change wines is a heresy; the tongue becomes saturated, and after the third glass even the best bottle yields but an obtuse sensation.” He breaks the book into three sections: 1) Why We Explore, 2) How We Explore, and 3) What Exploring Means Now. “Why We Explore” splits into 3 key points: anthropological, biological, neuroscientific. In the first point we learn “no other mammal moves around like we do” (page 21 / anthropological) and that “if you artificially boost dopamine levels in the brain, monkeys ramp up exploratory behavior” (page 43 / biological), and that people “like a frisson of uncertainty: Will this pen shock me? Is this roll stuffed with wasabi? What brand is this ad selling, anyway?” (page 63 / neuroscientific). The book helped me understand the heuristic known as the “explore – exploit dilemma” in which “a single instance of exploring will likely yield a worse-than-usual outcome, but the collective effect of repeatedly breaking free of your usual routines will be better outcomes—a faster commute, for example—in the long term. By breaking old habits, the uncertainty bonus helps you build better ones.” He teaches us that “What makes exploring hard—the uncertainty, the struggle, the possibility of failure—is, at least in part, what makes it rewarding” and that “to harness the power of exploring, then, we need to understand why we’re drawn to the unknown, what we’re seeking there, and how we can do it better.” There’s a lot of brilliance here! I was stunned into contemplation by the “Wundt Curve” he shares on page 65 which says that “in the Dark Room the situation is too simple” and in the Jungle “the situation is so complex we can’t make sense of it" … and, sort of like the last bowl of porridge, the Sweet Spot offers some “intermediate novelty and complexity” which makes it jusssssssst right.
Sort of a parallel to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (MEE-hy CHEEK-sent-mee-HAH-yee) concept of hitting flow. From there “How We Explore” and “What Exploring Means Now” offer a steady stream of insights (I especially enjoyed Chapter 10 on “Rediscovering Play” and Chapter 11 on “The Effort Paradox”.) If you are curious, if you itch for the other, this book will affirm and expand your awareness and understanding. A really wonderful book.
3. Three Days in June by Anne Tyler (b. 1941). I had such high hopes for this book! And there were moments of delight that would help me put it on a shelf between ‘The Rosie Project’ and ‘The Maid.’ But it didn’t have that tight dramatic “feel it in your stomach” type of coiling I got from ‘Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant’ (05/2022), which was recommended to me by Nancy the Librarian. But this new one: It’s good! But not great. You see the talent—the quick wrist-snap backhands in the writing. But you know how Quentin Tarantino is always saying he’s only making 10 movies total because “Directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film fucks up three good ones.” Well, is it like that with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists, too? I had to look it up. This is Anne Tyler’s twenty-fifth novel. She wrote her first in 1964 at age 22. She won the Pulitzer for ‘Breathing Lessons’ in 1989 and ‘Homesick,’ that gem, came out in 1982. Now, I did enjoy the plot here—long-ago divorced parents cohabitate for “three days in June” over the course of their only child’s wedding in suburban Baltimore, but I felt the awkward rehearsal and shocking beauty parlour disclosure scenes had more potential. Still, it’s a great little flipper—the tart and sour tone of our first-person narrator (and mother of the bride) Gail Baines does make for a certain kind of pleasurably ornery company.
4. Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food by Fadi Kattan (b. 1977). My grandparents-in-law are 92 and 91 and when I asked them what one of the biggest changes they’ve seen in Toronto in their lifetimes they said “The restaurants!” They told me there were diners, then Italian, then Chinese. Last year I was riding my bike past a stand advertising homemade “Damascene Cuisine!” and ended up having a great conversation with its two Syrian chefs. Then a couple weeks ago Leslie and I went to Louf, a new Palestinian restaurant opened by chef Fadi Kattan who also owns Fawda in Bethlehem (where he lives) and Akub in London. Place was packed, food was delicious, service wonderful, and we walked out buying his cookbook. In the introduction Kattan writes that “Cooking is how I tell Bethlehem’s story” and the book really is a mix of stories and recipes. In “Breakfasts with Baba Fuad” he writes that “As a boy, I was always required to help with breakfast preparations, making sure that the coffee cups, plates, cutlery, and napkins were all set neatly in place. Then came the tray laden with zeit o zaatar—the winning combination of olive oil and a zaatar spice blend, some addictive thick and sticky dibs o tahinia (grape molasses mixed with sesame paste), and the crown jewels, homemade jams provided by Mama Micheline.” Are you drooling? We’re not even at lunch! Like the restaurant, this book has a deep soul and it’s clear it was made with so much care and heart. It’s a cookbook so let me close with a few mouth-watering photos:
5. This Book is a Planetarium by Kelli Anderson. A wonderful book that’s only five two-page spreads. But each one pops out and is interactive. I wish they’d called it “This Book is a Guitar” or “This Book is a Speaker” because I think that might be a bit more accessible but I will say my kid’s eyes lit up when I turned the lights off in our windowless bathroom and slid my phone up from the bottom of the page under and into the “planetarium” to make the ceiling and walls glow with constellations:
And then on the “Instrument” page there’s a little pick in the top left that you can pull out and then strum the strings on a a guitar:
Older kids may get a kick out of the “Perpetual Calendar” which (in our family) meant everybody spinning the dials to figure out what day of the week their birthday will be when they turn 16, 18, or 100.
There’s also a speaker, decoder ring, and a spirograph. A bookish book showing books are not just books.
6. Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James Carse. I was playing road hockey with my kids. We played best of three, then best of five, then best of seven. I started telling them there was no point keeping score. That we’re one team. One family. That the real focus of this game is for these relationships to last forever. That’s the “infinite game” we’re playing above the “finite game” that is road hockey. They had stopped listening by then but, honestly, reading this book just helps you see things like that over and over ... everywhere. (Here’s my original review from 8/2022.) The book is 101 short chapters—a structure wonderfully copied by Douglas Rushkoff in ‘Team Human’ (2/2021)—and the first chapter is printed in full on the cover: “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.” Ball hockey? Finite. Togetherness? Infinite. One of my favourite quotes comes on page 73: “Winners, especially celebrated winners, must prove repeatedly they are winners. The script must be played over and over again. Titles must be defended by new contests. No one is ever wealthy enough, honored enough, applauded enough.” How true! The conclusion is of course that infinite games are all that matter. Love, friendship, marriage—constantly seeking to see that bigger picture, pushing ourselves out of win-lose scenarios, and helping make things work over the long term.
7. The Parent’s Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents by William Martin. And now it’s time Leslie’s Pick! Over to you Les: “Life has been flying fast (almost too fast!) for me lately and I have been finding it hard to slow down and dive deeply into a book (even though it’s probably exactly what I need). In times like these, books like this one help me find moments of calm, remind me what matters, and focus my mind on an intention or mantra. This book was gifted to me by my dear friend and mentor, Barb, who inspires me in the way that she moves slowly in a fast world, gardening in the sun, connecting deeply with the people right in front of her, and in how she can hold both the beauty and the hard of life at the same time. And so, reading this book also makes me feel connected to her. The poem that stuck out to me last night is called “Less Is More” and reads: ‘Your children do not need more. Each day adds more facts, more gadgets, more activities, more desires, and more confusion to their lives. Your task is to subtract. Each day seek to remove, to clarify, to simplify. Society’s wisdom adds, and confusion grows. The wisdom of the Tao subtracts, and serenity flourishes. If each day one minute less was spent doing something, and one minute more was spent being present, in simple pleasures, with your children, in two months you would transform your life, and theirs. One minute less.’ And so, my wish for you, is that if you choose to pick this book up it helps you find comfort and connection to all the other deeply feeling humans looking to embrace slow, less, bittersweetness, and meaning.”
8. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder (b. 1969). I was walking through Del Mar, California a few weeks ago when I stumbled on Camino Books, a new shop from veteran booksellers John and Alison who met in Berkeley in the early 1980s. I had a wonderful conversation with them which will come out as the next chapter of 3 Books. (Join us on Apple or Spotify.) When I first walked into Camino I felt like I was entering some kind of biblio-wonderland with stimulating displays, thoughtful curation, and ideas everywhere:
I ended up buying nine books (my haul is the second-to-last pic) but shipped a few locally (golf books for Freddo) and the rest in a small box to Canada due to a crammed suitcase. Buuuut I was able to slip into my pocket this thin 126-page manifesto-as-listicle from professor Timothy Snyder (formerly of Yale now at University of Toronto) which draws on twentieth-century history and sifts it into simple lessons to help us navigate today’s era. In #2 “Defend Institutions” he writes, “The mistake is to assume that rules who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.” In #7 “Be reflective if you must be armed” he writes, “If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no.” In #12 “Make eye contact and small talk” he writes, “Whether the recollection is of fascist Italy in the 1920s, of Nazi Germany of the 1930s, of the Soviet Union during the Great Terror of 1937-38, or of the purges in communist eastern Europe in the 1940s and ’50s, people who were living in fear of repression remembered how their neighbors treated them. A smile, a handshake, or a word of greeting—banal gestures in normal times—took on great significance. When friends, colleagues, and acquaintances looked away or crossed the street to avoid contact, fear grew. You might not be sure, today or tomorrow, who feels threatened in the United States. But if you affirm everyone, you can be sure that certain people will feel better.” From #14 “Establish a private life” to #15 “Contribute to good causes” to #20 “Be as courageous as you can” he shines light through a dark vision of today’s world.
9. Pastoralia: Stories and a Novella by George Saunders (b. 1958). My first George Saunders was ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ (4/2018) and since then I’ve loved his short stories (he has a new one in The Atlantic) and signed up for his Story Club Substack—which I highly recommend if you want to grow as a writer. A few years ago George gave us a generous interview on 3 Books (he's the definition of kind) and I thought of him again this month after reading his piercing “On the Firing of Dr. Carla D. Hayden” Op-Ed in The New York Times. I love George. I love George’s writing. Tight, unpredictable. This is a perfect book with endless moments so absurd, so silly, so striking, that I carried it with me this month and it helped jostle me off of anything bugging me so I could briefly live somewhere else.
10. There is no 10! Just a little lootbag of links. After five years of birding I finally wrote a long article giving my former self (and anybody needing a nudge) 8 reasons to get into birdwatching. Leslie and I had fun walking around Toronto with Ginny Yurich of 1000 Hours Outside. Ryan Holiday shares wonderful lessons from running his own independent book store. (Props to independent bookstores!) Is it Nic Cage or Nick Cave? Master distiller Tomas Peuyo on why Canada's population is so concentrated. My friend Panio has a new project that gives you direct access to your favorite authors. Mark Manson tells us “why everybody's stopped reading.” “Uber just invented... the bus.” “Basic human hygiene” says Dan Go. Ever wondered what gets mongered besides fear and fish? Terry Fox is my Tom Brady. e e cummings on being yourself. And Alex reminds us to break book rules!
Remember: You are what you eat. And you are what you read. Keep turning that page ... and I'll talk to you soon.
Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - April 2025
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Thank you for being part of the resistance!
A loyal band of people flipping pages in the age of infinite scrolls!
Last issue I shared some of your letters in the opening. It was popular so I'm doing it again! Scroll down to the picture if you want to skip to the reviews.
In response to my last Book Club (03/2025) Beth A. wrote:
I use this newsletter as a form of entertainment, as a form of finding books to add to my to-read list, and as a way to hear from someone else with a slightly different point of view. I'm challenged to read outside my genre and comfort. It makes me a better reader and a better person. I also appreciate Leslie's additions for the same reason.
Thanks Beth! Leslie is back this month with a book she’s been raving about. I love hearing about different reading habits so much. Mary S. shared hers:
I do not have time for much fiction. I am much more interested in learning about relevant world problems and subjects like longevity and brain trauma research. Right now I am reading ‘The Ageless Brain’ by Dale Bredesen.
Looks great. Adding to my TBR! Thanks Mary. And then Bo B. wrote saying:
I also recently read Sahil's ‘5 Types of Wealth,’ and I can totally relate to your review. The book is quite an accomplishment, how he brought together some of the most popular studies, practices, and principles. The bibliography section alone is probably worth the price of the book. I can see it showing up in lists like “Most Practical Books for Graduates” or something. But did I like the book? Would I recommend it to a friend? That's tougher for me to answer. I found it mildly exhausting to read for any stretch of time, like doing a mental HIIT workout. Maybe it's too optimized, kinda how a ChatGPT summary of an article seems to lose the charm of the fabric of thought that the author was working with. I highlighted the hell out of the book, but I wouldn't say it was an enjoyable read. In contrast, I also read ‘The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life’ by Boyd Varty. It's a fraction of the length. There are virtually no references to any studies. But I found this book to have much more heart, and the message was more impactful. I recommend it!
Thank you, Bo! Always good to hear from you. The book recos we share here are gold. I value this Saturday morning coffee shop chat so much. We help each other grow. I'd like to start ‘opening letters’ as a regular feature! If I feature a snip of your letter (i.e., email-reply) to my book club I'll sign and mail you a book to say thanks. OK, finally this month let's go to Devra T.:
Must hear more about FFF!! I've been thinking about the comings and goings of friendships, having naturally grown out of one last year and we are building a new one with some of our youngest daughter's friend's parents currently. I haven't read widely on the topic (yet), being a natural extrovert I am quick to ‘make friends.’ But it is true that we expect friendships, like romantic relationships, to be effortless, and if there is effort involved, then it's not worthwhile to continue trying. The same is true of neighbors and neighborhoods. To ponder when looking at the rise in loneliness.
Interesting, Devra. Thank you. Friendships are definitely two-way. My favorite book on friends is Robin Dunbar's ‘How Many Friends Does One Person Need?’ (BO2023).
Fun hearing from you and keep ’em coming. Apologies in advance if I miss your note or don't reply. I try!
Now let's hit the books!
Neil
P.S. I don't advertise. This is word of mouth. Invite others here.
1. High Five by Adam Rubin. Illustrated by Daniel Salmieri. I think this is the most underrated children’s book of the past few years. Came out in 2019 before getting buried in pandemic quicksand. Bookstores closed, browsing closed—boxing-glove-to-jaw punchout for picture books. Yet years later I still find myself turning to it every month or two when I’ve been away and need a fun, long, cuddly half-hour read to fill up. Who else has a good book for staying in their kid's beds—lingering, loitering, lavishly languishing? The book opens with an announcement! Told in just two of its magnificent forty rhyming paragraphs:
For the rest of the book the reader is thrust into participating in the “75th Annual High Five Tournament” and then steps into the ring to physically battle—high five!—a series of contestants ranging from “Gigantic The Bear with 700 pounds of hair” to “Kangaroo Paul with Fastest Hands Of Them All” to “Octopus Jones” who, of course, requires eight high fives to defeat. With a scribbly first-person perspective and boxing-ring-style judges rating your high fives in front of a thunderous crowd in a packed arena, you somehow manage to obliterate the competition. Reads like you’re Little Mac playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!. Who is the scarier final opponent?
I’m adding this to my new list (Neil.blog, Goodreads) called “Massively Underrated Picture Books.”
2. In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honoré. Do you inspect other people’s bookshelves? It’s okay. You can admit it. You’re not judging them—no book guilt, no book shame!—but … getting to know them. Paying attention to what they’re paying attention to! (Anne Bogel of What Should I Read Next? shares this fascination and we discussed it in Union Square). Well, I’m a book shelf inspector too, and thank goodness for that. Otherwise I may never have found this gem more than a decade ago when I visited my then-girlfriend Leslie’s parent’s house and found a couple bookshelves by the ping pong table. I love this book. I’ve read it three times now. If you don’t know Carl Honoré you could start with his hit 2005 TED Talk of the same name. Or, you know, just read the transcript. Why? Because as Carl says: “Everyone wants to know how to slow down but they want to know how to slow down quickly.” Since its 2004 publication this magnum opus has only become more important. On page 9 Carl quotes Milan Kundera’s ‘Slowness’ (3/2025) “When things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself.” Milan Kundera, where art thou now? Maybe having coffee in the clouds with Neil Postman, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and David Foster Wallace? Part of the reason I force myself to write these superlong book clubs, and do them by, you know, writing with my own fingers instead of using AI is … to help my own brain slow down. We have to remember: Endless scrolling was invented in 2006, TikTok in 2016, 5-second images of anything you can think of in 2025. We are experiencing a grand quickening. The danger is that Kundera’s prophecy may come true. Step one in steadying yourself in the tidal wave? Read this book. Learn to find your own pace in the machine and find areas in your life you can purposefully shift the gears back down to “human.” One of the most eye-opening sections comes early when from pages 42-44 he traces the resistance to the cult of speed over the ages. There are so many tidbits on slowing down, though—in food, in sex, in … everything. On page 228 he describes how educator Jenny Harley and her reading club consumed ‘Little Dorrit’ by Charles Dickens (1812-1870) “in the same way it would have been read in its day—in monthly instalments spread over a year and a half.” I love that! And what does she say afterwards? “When you rattle through it, you don’t appreciate some of the jokes and waiting games, and the play that Dickens makes with secret stories and hidden plots.” Secret stories? Hidden plots? Sounds like detail, mystery, complexity, nuance! Not sure about you but I’m not getting much of that on social media. How about this provocative idea on page 101: “In a recent British show, motorists caught driving too fast in a school zone were given a choice between paying the fine and facing the local children. Those who chose the latter sat ashen-faced at the head of a classroom, fielding poignant questions from kids as young as six: How would you feel if you ran me over? What would you say to my parents if you killed me? The drivers were visibly shaken. One woman wept. All went away vowing never to break the speed limit again.” Crazy idea? Bit unethical as rich people can just buy their way out, maybe? (Should we adopt the Finnish community trust-building strategy of charging traffic violations as a percentage of income?) This book isn’t just preaching a “slow at all costs vibe” though. It’s preaching mastery. (Preach about mastery, Derek!) Silencing your inner sea so greatness can bubble up from the deep. He peppers in great quotes from Captain J. A. Hadfield (“This art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of energy in our great men.”) and Albert Einstein (“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.”) Taken together it’s a manifesto—a hold onto your caps and your brains, folks—as we continue plugging ourselves deeper into the matrix. Benefits of meditation, resurgence of tantra sex, how garden views reduce pain—it’s all here. A masterful tour de force.
3. Ghost by Jason Reynolds. A 180-page, 14-point-font book you will feel, love, learn from, and fly through. My wife was scrolling through Indigo’s well-curated lists hunting for books for our oldest. He’d just finished the 5-book ‘The Academy’ series—about a boy who works towards living his dream playing in the Premier League—and she found … this. Confusing title, maybe. Ghost? But it pulls you in with a loud, punchy, center-channel voice. Ghost is the self-anointed nom-de-plume of Castle Cranshaw, a poor seventh grade kid who accidentally joins a local track team and finds himself addressing his own trauma (on page 5 his dad drunkenly fires a gun at him and his mom as they flee their apartment and gets sentenced to 10 years in prison) and anger (he punches a bully out in the cafeteria a few pages later) on a deep, visceral, emotional level. Jason Reynolds is a magician. And the voice—what a voice. From page 4: “I got to punch that jerk Brandon in the face—I know, I know, not cool, but still!—leave school early, and hang out at the track with my new coach—because I was on a team now—who turned out to be a pretty cool dude. Me and Coach didn’t go no further into my life or nothing like that, which was a good thing because I never really told nobody about my dad.” Perfect storytelling, memorable characters—it'll have you feeling like you can do the 100 meters in under 10 by the end.
4. Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover. Years ago I flew to New York for Book Expo and went to some fancy dinner with my literary agent and a dozen publishing people. I remember like half of them were carrying this book. So I bought it … and put it on my shelf … where it sat for 7 years until the ever-insightful Kim Holderness told me it’s one of her 3 most formative (along with ‘Quiet’ by Susan Cain [2/2020] and ‘Bossypants’ by Tina Fey) and that she still thinks about every week. Every week? 7 years later? I cracked it open. And the energy that shot out of the pages kept me gripped late into the night for weeks. The book took me far, far away before slingshotting me back to a here and now that felt strange and familiar. We open in the 90s on the side of an Idaho mountain where “cliffs appeared suddenly [and] feral horses, belonging to my grandpa, ran wild over thick banks of water hemlock, and there were more than a few rattlesnakes.” Tara tells her tale in endless tight, gripping stories from her vantage point as the youngest of seven in a large family with an extremist father who works at “scrapping” and doesn’t trust the government or doctors or schools. (“I may as well surrender my kids to the devil himself as send them down the road to that school.”) No one goes to school. They wander, work, get hit in the head by metal tossed at them by their dad, fall off skids high in the air on unstable forklifts their dad is steering and crack their heads on concrete, get into car accidents in the middle of nights in their car full of kids lying everywhere with no seatbelts, and drive with their mom to high-risk pregnancies helping deliver babies for people who would rather die than go to a hospital. This book isn’t as good as everyone says—it’s better. Slap to the face, splash to the face. And it’s two books, really. The first half you’re living a wild, thrilling, confusing, loving, frenzied upbringing of self-discovery and the second you’re with Tara as she goes to BYU then Cambridge then Harvard then Cambridge again. Together they make a sour-sweet-sour read that is a wondrous eyes-open summary of the supremely talented Tara Westover’s first 34 years. A take-your-breath-away book.
5. The Days Are Just Packed: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection by Bill Watterson (b. 1958). Last week I saw Ryan Holiday ask people on Twitter, “What’s your favorite book to re-read?” so I threw in my response:
Replying made me realize I ... hadn’t actually picked up a Calvin and Hobbes in a while. Over a year? For sure I read the first and last ones when Daniels (Everything Everywhere All At Once) picked them as formative. But it's been too long! The strip is one of the world’s most exquisite artistic feats. For ten straight years from 1985 to 1995 Bill Watterson (then aged 27 to 37) published a brand new Calvin and Hobbes strip … every day. Every day! And this collection in particular is his first “widescreen” book where Watterson, who was being published in over 2000 major newspapers at the time, unleashed his full powers and unshackled himself from the constrained universe of small-box funnies. Like on page 7 and 10 of the book the first two Sunday strips still have that awkward-but-mandatory “2-panel punchline” because some papers ran with the header and some ran without:
But Watterson then started putting out his newfangled “take it or leave it” big Sunday rectangles which trashed convention and introduced dynamic new ways to tell stories. (I love the opening line in the first-ever Sunday box-busting strip with Calvin transgressively saying: “If you ask me, Hobbes, the whole notion of ‘instant gratification’ is a myth!”) By the end of this book he's doing acrobatic leaps, bounds—into the clouds, into the stratosphere—beyond the reach of every other cartoonist of the time and (maybe) since:
Watterson never commercialized Calvin. No ads, no sponsors, no commercials, no interruptions. I love it. I admire it. I respect it. There are no Hobbes stuffies, no Miss Wormwood dartboards, no horrible "Calviner and Hobbes" Netflix version with too-high-pitched-and-too-low-pitched voices. So the comic books remain highly, highly potent. Plus, over the years, they've become increasingly prophetic. Much of what maligned Watterson through his 20s and 30s feels like it’s been blooming like a grey cloud. No wonder after his sudden and surprising retirement he has seemingly spent his 40s, 50s, and now 60s with his family—painting pictures he doesn’t share or post, declining every interview request, and steering well clear of any kind of public or online existence. His strips serve as brain jostles. Pokes in the dark. They haven't aged a bit! Like where Calvin is wearing pyjamas standing in front of his TV holding a bowl in the first panel saying “Oh greatest of the mass media, thank you for elevating emotion, reducing thought, and stifling imagination” before continuing in the second “Thank you for the artificiality of quick solutions and for the insidious manipulation of human desires for commercial purposes” before bowing down with the bowl in front of him in the third panel saying “This bowl of lukewarm tapioca represents my brain. I offer it in humble sacrifice. Bestow thy flickering light forever.” A final panel shows his mom in her nightie with bleary eyes staring at the flashing TV in the middle of the night. Um, indeed. Ever-illuminating. Ever-wondrous. Worth being read again ... and again ... and again. (P.S. If you haven’t read it I recommend Bill's 1990 Commencement speech to Kenyon College—to my knowledge the only public speech he's ever done.)
6. Raising Calm Kids in a World of Worry: Tools to Ease Anxiety and Overwhelm by Ashley Graber and Maria Evans. And now it’s time for a “Leslie’s Pick” where we feature a book recently read and loved by my beautiful wife, Leslie. Over to her! “There’s a real buzz of anxiety and worry in the world right now. With AI, political headlines, and climate doom, parents have a lot to stress over—both in our everyday reality and in our long term guiding of our children. We all know there’s no such thing as ‘perfect parenting’ and Graber and Evans's writing is warm and accessible as they share concrete strategies to develop psychological safety for children using an acronym called SAFER (Set the tone, Allow feelings to guide behaviours, Form identity, Engage like a pro, Role model). They also outline for parents how to understand our child’s worry and place it in context of what’s developmentally normal as well as when to get extra help. Full of relatable stories about real life current day families and unlike many parenting books that just make me feel like there’s more to do, this is a calming, comforting support on the honourable, challenging, and ever-rewarding journey of parenting in today’s demanding times!”
7. “The World Porn Made” by Sophie Gilbert. Not a book! But a long 10-page feature article that will stop you in your tracks. I was walking through the Orlando airport last week after missing my flight when I picked up the current issue of The Atlantic. A few flips in came this astounding feature by Sophie Gilbert who takes a from-outer-space view of pornography’s impact on culture over the past 50 years from VCRs to Trump’s latest retweet. I am 45—just 3 years older than the author—and she completely nails the social zeitgeist I grew up in, too. One that starts at the dawn of the millennium when “Britney Spears appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone lying on a pink bed wearing polka-dot panties and a black push-up bra, clutching a Teletubby doll” in the swirl of Best Picture-winner American Beauty where “a middle-aged man has florid sexual fantasies about his teenage daughter’s best friend” and the introduction of the Abercrombie & Fitch holiday catalog which featured “nude photo spreads, sly references to oral sex and threesomes, and an interview with porn actress Jenna Jameson, in which she was repeatedly harangued by the interviewer to let him touch her breasts.” What’s the lesson she and her friends pick up? That their power was sexual. Flash forward a couple decades and Roe v. Wade is overturned and now we have Gilbert, post-pandemic, post-kids, looking back and observing how porn has “changed our culture, and, in doing so, has filtered into our subconscious minds, beyond the reach of rationality and reason.” In 1985 Americans rented 75 million adult videos. In 1995 that number was 750 million. Performers from Madonna to Snoop Dogg to The Weeknd were quick to cash in by starring in pornographic offerings and technology was often reverse engineered based on demands from porn. “Google Images was created after Jennifer Lopez wore a vivid-green jungle-print Versace dress to the 2000 Grammy Awards, cut so spectacularly low that it became the most popular search query Google had seen to date. Facebook was born in 2004, after Mark Zuckerberg first experimented with making a website dedicated to assessing the relative hotness of Harvard undergraduates. And when Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steve Chen founded YouTube in 2005, it was partly because Karim had been searching for videos of Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’ at the Super Bowl and couldn’t easily find one.” She catalogs what we did to people—from underage women in ‘Girls Gone Wild’ tapes to Pamela Anderson’s illegally stolen-from-her-locked-bedroom-safe-and-released honeymoon sex tape to Jennifer Ringley, college nerd and first ‘cam girl’ of Jennicam to VP-candidate Sarah Palin who, after her nomination, had lookalikes hired by Larry Flynt off Craigslist to shoot a pornographic film in 10 days called Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?. It’s scary how the algorithm’s thirst for endless extremes to get eyeballs is what’s driven culture. In 2001 in The Guardian Martin Amis wrote about the business of porn and said that “The new element is violence.” Perhaps the most horrifying takeaways come today when the author discusses elements of the campaign against Kamala Harris that are honestly too shocking for me to even write here. I struggle with pornography’s deep intertwining relationship in our culture. I’m raising kids. I worry about what they’ll see, when they’ll see it, how to keep them safe—how to keep them sane. For fathers, for mothers, for sisters, for brothers, this is an illuminating light on our culture with the goal, the hopeful goal, of seeing it and observing it, so we may rid ourselves of the mask, and then discuss and engage with it in an open and healthier way. I’ve had a subscription to The Atlantic off and on for decades and just renewed it. They've been independent for 168 years! It started with Thoreau writing about abolitionism! I applaud their dedication to longform journalism, I crave their deep research in an era of the sound bite, and I have loved recent featured articles and short stories from people like Jonathan Haidt, Anne Applebaum, and George Saunders. Click here to read this article (via a gift link) and click here to join me with a subscription.
8. Fifty Ideas For Building Better Cities: The Monocle Companion. Maybe six or seven years ago my neighbour Jason and I went up and down the street and knocked on doors to collect fifty signatures on a homemade letter which we gave to our city councillor who presented it to Toronto City Council. Six weeks later we had speed bumps installed on our street and our kids only needed to beware of cars going 30 or 40km/hour instead of 60 or 70. I am slightly embarrassed that this was probably my first form of civic activism. I liked it! Since then I’ve helped get traffic lights installed, repaired dangerous sidewalks, and helped beautify corners. I haven’t done much—praise be to mayors and councillors!—but I’m learning how easy it is to be helpful on a small scale. Sometimes international and national news stories can feel just way above our abilities to do anything. But we can read neighbourhood signs, talk to interesting people we meet (like Doug, Soyoung, or Nickisha), and send in protest letters. What helps? This book! I bought it last year from the Monocle Store on College Street West in downtown Toronto (one of six Monocle stores globally with the others in London, Zürich, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and Tokyo). And I love Monocle’s ethos of graphic design, culture, and travel together with their philosophy of being totally off social media and instead focusing on very human and analog-y outputs of print, radio, books, and newsletters. So what’s in the book? 50 loosely held-together ideas presented in accessibly tart essays which include “#12 Playgrounds for change” (“Residents should be annoyed if a crude graffiti tag appears on a new slide. They need to care if teenagers start littering a playground floor”) to “#19 The sensory city” (“The membrane of touchpoints and details that connect us to urban life on the surface—planting, seating, music, games—are being value-engineered out of existence”) to “#21 A Sky full of plants” (“Gustavo Gandini, a professor of animal genetics at the University of Milan, is tending to a lavender bush on his abundantly green seventh-floor terrace”). Some essays are lyrical like the four-page gem “#25 Why we need city laureates,” some articulate truths you may have felt before like “#31 The pedestrian manifesto,” and others provoke imagination and energy like “#34 Every city needs a fairground.” I like this book because it makes civic activism and political change feel … accessible. We can’t call the President but we can call our locals! We can protest! We can. We should. Sometimes, honestly, if you’re inclined to help then the old adage to “Think Global and Act Local” still applies. Whether it’s picking up trash at the park, joining a local group asking for change, or just collecting signatures for a set of speed bumps or a traffic light, this book offers a set of spurs and inspiration to help.
9. Nine! There is no nine. Just a little diary entry and some links. I've been in Airplane Mode lately. Suddenly everyone's having a conference! San Diego, Nashville, Dallas, Houston, Wichita, and Orlando ... in two weeks. In Orlando I spoke to 1500 911 (and 999!) operators about research-backed ways to take care of our mental health so we can show up for others. I shared many things you’ve heard me talk about before including, of course, reading 2 pages of fiction before bed. (46% of us read 0 books in the past year.) I wrote down ‘19 Things I Would Tell Myself At Age 19’ and slipped in a fun walk with Nickisha the Dog Walker—who walks 100km a week! I enjoyed this new conversation between Jonathan Haidt and Ezra Klein on the status of the phone-free childhood. Btw, Jon’s book, ‘The Anxious Generation,’ just hit a year straight on the New York Times bestseller list since it came out. My review is here and my favorite pages here and here. As AI quickly soaks into everything at its endlessly dizzying pace I found some comfort in the ideas in Mat Balez's wonderful essay “Parenting for superintelligence.” The woodpeckers are fighting back. Karen W. let me know that Little Free Library just opened its 200,000th book box! Are you high agency or low agency? You've heard of slow productivity; now it's time for slow travel. Great article on developing a deep reading habit. Eric Jorgenson asks “What guest will you listen to on ANY podcast?” Gladwell twitter-punches. Dan Go reminds us health doesn't have to be hard. NNT gets corrected by Community Notes. What TikTok execs say about TikTok. I thought Mark Carney was thanking me for a second! (Though I agree with the other Neil.) And may we always remember: We can't do it alone. Thank you for reading to the end. Thank you for being here. It really does take a village.
Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - March 2025
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
We’re still reading!
Trying, anyway. Even two pages a night helps! Peeling ourselves off screens an hour before bed lets our pineal gland crank out more melatonin to help us sleep. Less screens, more books!
I love the replies you sent me on last month's book club like from Melissa C who wrote:
Your Bookclub refreshes me. I find new books, I share your thoughts on old favourites; and many of your reviews push me to read a book I have known about but for no known reason avoided (I’m ready for H is for Hawk now!). The Little House on the Prairie series got me through the pandemic. I listened to Cherry Jones read the series via my library app, and it took me away from my worries and anxieties…
I’ll check out Cherry Jones! And I’m hearing a lot of you using library apps like Libby. I do prefer paper, I admit—but all reading is reading! Keep the recos coming. Like this from Casey F:
Apologies if these were in an episode of 3 Books (I am so far behind!), but have you ever read any of the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books? They're old fashioned, feature lots of different bratty-but-normal kids, and Mrs. Piggle Wiggle is amazing and also a little nuts. PS Read one of the original 4, by Betty MacDonald, not “Happy Birthday, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle” which was completed by her daughter and isn't quite the same.
I haven’t! But now I will add it to my skyscraper-high TBR. I also love hearing your reading stories like from Lidia M:
Dear Neil, I developed a love of reading early in life, I could see the scenes in my head and dreamed the stories at night. The characters peopled my life with vivid images of exotic lives outside of my own and fueled my imagination. I read voraciously. Now, later in life I have little time for devouring books but your reviews inspire me to read and pull me back to when this was so possible. Something I anticipate returning to. Thank you for contributing to keeping this alive for me...
And you for me! Reading isn’t always easy so we need each other’s encouragement. Keep it coming! Just reply to this email anytime…
Now let’s hit the books!
Neil
P.S. Invite others to join us here.
1. Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World by Anne Applebaum (b. 1964). What is going on in the world right now? There’s an incessant rubber-mallet-to-the-forehead quality in the news. The zone is officially flooded and the overwhelming quantity of cheap misinformation together with the proliferation of bots, trolls, and AI-backed spammers manipulating the algorithms (who are incentivized to feed us anything to draws us in!) threatens to destabilize reality and obscure what’s really happening. This tiny and powerful book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum zooms up and above the daily “whats” and gives us the more illuminating and horrifying “whys” and “hows.” From page 27: “Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead.” And yet they have! Deeply so. In the first of 5 compressed and highly detailed chapters she writes: “The globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance the democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.” I mean: I remember going on Twitter a decade ago when some big event was happening—the Oscars, the World Series, a big political announcement—and I’d hit the ‘For You’ feed and it was this beautiful cacophony of voices. Now it’s bogged down by unreliable spam. And it’s not just Twitter but most places. I learned in this book that in Central and South America the most common news is Chinese. Chinese news! China is one of a growing number of countries making up “Autocracy Inc” and we learn in Chapter 3 on “Controlling the narrative” how deep the surveillance goes. From page 69 we learn how China requires all Uighur muslims to download
...nanny apps on their phones which constantly search for ‘ideological viruses,’ including Koranic verses and religious references as well as suspicious statements in all forms of correspondence. The apps can monitor purchases of digital books and track an individual’s location, sending the information back to police. They can also pick up unusual behavior: anyone who downloads a virtual private network, anyone who stays off-line altogether, and anyone whose home uses too much electricity (which could be evidence of a secret houseguest) can arouse suspicion. Voice-recognition technology and even DNA swabs are used to monitor where Uighurs walk, drive, and shop.
But it is just oppressed minorities under dictatorships? Or … all of us? It’s not like the autocracies—defined as governments where one person possess unlimited power—are doing the twentieth century thing of pretending they’re giving us utopias. No, on page 74, Applebaum writes that the “…propagandists of Autocracy, Inc., have learned from the mistakes … they don’t offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and they don’t inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, because there is no better world to build.” The decline in power of international organizations—like NATO, the WHO, and International Courts—reduces accountability for autocratic nations to suffer any kind of retribution for breaking global laws. Before our incoming Prime Minister Mark Carney took office a couple weeks ago we saw him resign from private boards and put his personal assets in blind trust to avoid conflict of interests. Contrast this to Presidents selling private crypto-coins or shilling cars from White House lawn. “Come on down!” Language is of course emerging as a battleground. I read with horror about the Newspeak emerging as words such as ‘inclusivity,’ ‘mental health,’ and ‘activism’ are being phased out. Don’t say those words! Can’t say those words! From page 102:
To protect its sovereignty, China seeks to change other kinds of language too. Instead of ‘political rights’ or ‘human rights’, the Chinese want the UN and other international organizations to talk about win-win cooperation—by which they mean that everyone will benefit if each country maintains its own political system. They also want to popularize mutual respect—by which they mean that no one should criticize anyone else.
These words are getting inserted into UN documents and “if mutual respect, win-win cooperation, and sovereignty prevail, then there is no role for human rights advocates, international commissions of inquiry, or any public criticism of Chinese policy in Tibet, Hong Kong, or Xinjiang at all.” Chapter 4 on “Smearing the democrats” shows how reputations in the era of social media overwhelm are taken down by anyone trying to fight for freedom and democracy. Why? Because as Anne writes on page 142 “when something ‘secret’ is revealed about an activist or political figure, perhaps through the publication of a taped conversation or a hacked email, it creates an impression that the person is dishonest and has something to hide, even when the tape or the hacked email contains no evidence of wrongdoing.” This book was published just before the US election of 2024 and there is an ominous close where Anne reminds us on page 148 that Trump seeks to “stoke anger and even violence against people he dislikes, including federal judges” and that “If he ever succeeds in directing federal courts and law enforcement at his enemies, in combination with a mass trolling campaign, then the blending of the autocratic and democratic worlds will be complete.” Is there hope? I mean—yes, thankfully. The closing chapter is a call to arms for people to rise up and fight through legal means the growing autocracy. It’s not easy. But it starts with books. Peeling ourselves off ad-based algorithms full of misinformation wired to confuse us—and getting back into books like this accessible and fearless writeup by a super-articulate history-based Pulitzer-prize winning Yale, LSE, and Oxford-educated journalist. She’s got the chops and she’s breathtakingly fearless in calling spades spades. This is a wake-up call we owe it to ourselves to read, share, and pass along. Highly recommended.
2. Crooked Plow: A Novel by Itamar Vieira Junior (b. 1979). The Atlantic slave trade lasted nearly 400 years from the early 1500s to the late 1800s with over 12 million Africans shipped to toil in plantations across the Americas. The number is actually far higher than 12 million because so many people died en route or upon arriving. (As an aside, the most vivid description of slave ships I’ve read is in the phenomenal novel ‘The Book of Negroes’ by Lawrence Hill.) I didn’t know Brazil is where the *first* slave ships went, the *most* slaves went (nearly half the 12 million), and the *last* slave ships went—with slavery abolished there in 1888. But what is abolished? As Vieira Junior writes through a character on page 170: “My father, she went on, was born almost thirty years after enslaved Blacks had been declared free, when in reality they were still captives of the descendants of their grandparents’ masters.” This is a transporting 276-page novel almost entirely taking place in a camp on a plantation in Northeastern Brazil from early to late twentieth century. It is told in three sweeping chunks by three different narrators. In the first pages a seven-year-old girl named Bibiana and her sister find a knife under their grandmothers’ bed and tragedy ensues with one girl accidentally slicing off her tongue. The writing ingeniously hides what really happened to whom until the second part of the book begins with the story told and expanded upon from the other sister’s perspective. A haunting, fly somewhere far-far-away novel that takes you deep into mud huts on the Água Negra plantation. You feel like you’re there: in the backbreaking labor while “pressing palm oil” and “peeling buriti” and navigating puberty and tragedy and oppression and violence and love. The title of the book is revealed on page 179 through the voice of the tongue-less character: “… the sound that came from my mouth was an aberration, chaotic, as if the severed chunk of my tongue had been replaced by a hard-boiled egg. My voice was a crooked plow, deformed, penetrating the soil only to leave it infertile, ravaged, destroyed.” If you liked ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ by Zora Neale Hurston (2/2018) you’ll love this, too. With some pepper shakes of magic realism and an endlessly floaty vibe that leaves you feeling like you’re on a boat. I was sent the book from my friend Wagner Moura (Civil War, Elite Squad) who called it a “beautiful book with strong social criticism and depiction of injustices in poor rural areas.” Published in 2018 and translated into English in 2023 this book won *all three* of Brazil’s top literary prizes.
3. The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide To Design Your Dream Life by Sahil Bloom. I struggled to write this review. This book is good. Really good! Did we expect anything less from Sahil (“SA-hill”) Bloom, *the* Sahil Bloom, the potentially most optimized person I’ve ever met, with his six-pack of steel, his membership to the Core Club in Manhattan (where he’s the youngest member), his double-Stanford pedigree (which he jokes in the book and other spots doesn’t keep up with his Yale sister, Harvard dad, and Princeton mom, who still encourages him, to this day, to “try for medical school” (page 5)). Even his haircut is “intimidating”—according to Susan Cain, who makes a wonderful wisdom-drenched cameo on page 229 in a two-pager co-written with Sahil titled, somewhat unSusanny, “Mental Hacks I Wish I Knew At Twenty-Two.” I mean, the man wakes up at 4am every day to take a televised ice bath. He is OPTIMIZED. I picture him discussing one-legged Romanian Deadlift angles and best brands of organic avocado oil in a group chat with Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferriss, and Bryan Johnson. And big respect to all those guys—it’s not easy being so public, pushing yourself, pushing our understanding of how hard pushing is possible. Just for me I … didn’t quite connect with the book the way I expected to and way I often do with Sahil’s wonderful email newsletter The Curiosity Chronicle. On page 7 Sahil writes: “I was thirty years old and making millions of dollars.” And right away it’s like—um, that’s a tough place to connect. He confesses right afterwards that “…the feelings of happiness and fulfillment I expected were nowhere to be found.” We know this! We hear this everywhere. Money doesn’t make you happy! Just that most of us would like the millions of dollars first—you know, just to be sure. Unfulfilled workaholic twentysomething multimillionaire? This is your bible! He speaks, like we all do I suppose, to the me-of-yesteryear. I guess for me that super left-brainy, quantitative, systems-everything guy is still in there, for sure … just a bit distant. I think I kept wanting to *feel* the book more—in my gut, in my heart. But it just kind of put its feet up in my left brain. I like my left brain! I have sticker charts and trackers up the wazoo. But I also think I read, partly, to get away from that, to tone down that side of myself, to enter places of greater vastness and spirit and soul. As ever: right book, right time. And I do think this book will catch people—like it caught famed billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who Sahil shares he reached out to over Twitter for lunch years ago, or billionaire Apple CEO Tim Cook, who Sahil shares he met while working out regularly in a gym in SF at 4am (“There are no losers in the gym at 4:45 AM,” he says). It’ll catch people who maybe need to chill more? Need to call their mom more, need to get outside more, need to sleep more … need to think about money *less*. In some sense this book feels like you fed every uber-popular self-help book (like those that’ve sold >5 million copies) and every uber-popular self-help viral tweet or LinkedIn post (those that’ve been viewed >5 million times) and you stirred, stirred, stirred them together in a big yellow bowl before pouring that chunky batter into muffin-cup chapters and baked it all into something moist and delightfully chunk-free. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s incredibly hard to do this! I’m just saying that if you’ve read the genre widely then you probably read about the Eisenhower Matrix (pages 96-97) in ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’; the history of Parkinson’s Law (pages 100-101) in ‘The Happiness Equation’ and, let’s be honest, before that in ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ (and, before that, probably in ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen); and you probably saw Benjamin Franklin’s ‘daily calendar’ (pages 115-116) in … ‘The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.’ If you’ve been online a lot you’ve probably seen the viral Ikigai graphic (pages 212-213), heard the Steve Jobs commencement speech (pages 216-217), and heard many versions of famous Joseph Heller “I’ve got something he can never have … enough” story (pages 313-314) a few places. But, of course, those pieces have gone viral for a reason, and finding them all, bringing them together, is no small feat. This is a book full of “life productivity techniques.” Not getting more done, but maximizing yourself on all the scales. On page 55 he encourages everyone to sit down and write a letter to their future selves. This is the kind of thing I want to do, and maybe should do—but it’s hard. It helps that Sahil generously shares the letter he wrote to himself in 2014 at age 23 which includes lines like “You have a lot you hide from the world. You’re insecure. You compare yourself to everyone but yourself.” and “I hope you live closer to your family” and “I hope you’re working on something that feels meaningful.” Now he his! And you love him for it, for finding and following his dream. He details in the opening chapter a story that feels like Tim Urban’s “The Tail End”—about how a friend told him given he only sees his east coast parents once a year, and they’re in their mid-sixties, he’ll only see them 15 more times in his life. Of course, some of the examples on how to correct this, are … kind of funny. Like on page 37, when Sahil discusses Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph's sturdy rule for himself. What’s the sturdy rule? Every Tuesday night Marc makes sure work is “wrapped up by five” so he can have dinner with his wife. He developed the system after working “eighty hour weeks.” I mean, on one hand, sure. But on the other hand, who the heck is working 7am to 7pm for 7 days a week—so much so they need to calendar in a weekly dinner with their wife? I’d resonate more with the story if it was the other way: tracking nights away from dinner with your family, which feels like the more obvious expected baseline. But I do agree: if you never have dinner with your wife scheduling one a week is a good start! Sahil is an eager and hard-working disciple and distiller and his efforts come through. In this 369-page book, stuffed to the absolute brim with tools, models, “razors,” quotes, and heuristics, you will likely find one thing, perhaps many things, that you can reliably and valuably apply to improve your life. This man has the steepest learning curve, the steepest output curve, and one of the sharpest minds of anyone I know. He's in his early thirties and I know will be someone to follow for decades. I can't wait to see what he gives us in 5 years, 10 years, and beyond.
4. What An Owl Knows: The New Science Of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds by Jennifer Ackerman (b. 1959). A couple months ago my friend Scott and I were traipsing through knee-deep snow in -20C/-4F weather just after sunrise way, way out on the Leslie Spit—an ancient garbage pile poking into Lake Ontario that’s since evolved into a bird paradise—when we suddenly saw a Long-Eared Owl glowering at us. Scott snapped a picture, we stepped backwards, one of us stepped on a stick that cracked and just like that the bird was gone. But what a picture he nabbed!
I don’t see owls very often. None of us do! That word “enigmatic” is so perfect—“hard to understand or explain, inscrutable or mysterious” according to Merriam Webster—when describing these 60-million-year-old (!) birds. For reference, Home Sapiens have been around 300,000 years and Homo Erectus were about 1.5 million years ago. Said another way: This planet belongs to the owls. We just live here! What an intoxicating and never-ending pleasure of trivia this book is as we follow the warm and sagacious Jennifer Ackerman through her pilgrimage to better understand these fascinating birds. From page xvii: “Why do an owl’s eyes, alone in the bird world, face the same way ours do? What made the early ancestors of owls cross the boundary into night?... How are owls adapting to shifts in their habitat and global climate?” First up! Where did they come from. Well, “like all birds, they initially arose from a group of small, mostly predatory, running dinosaurs that were coexisting with other, larger dinosaurs sixty-six million years ago.” The trivia is endless: “Of the 11,000 or so species of birds alive today, only 3 percent have adaptations that allow for stalking prey in the dark.” Feathered talons help! As do satellite dome faces! And the ability to hear a mouse running under a foot of snow! We learn on page 90 that “if a nesting Great Horned Owl is threatened by a dog or other predator, it will fluff up its feathers and throw itself to the ground, flapping around as if its wing is injured and squealing once or twice…” and on page 91 that “owlets begin vocalizing in the egg, even before they hatch.” Btw, did you know Great Horned Owls consume over *500* species? From shrews to rats to jackrabbits to ducks to ferrets to foxes to skunks! (They don’t smell skunks like pretty much everything else making them the only predator for most skunks, which are 3 times as heavy!) WATCH OUT EVERYTHING! I love this book. It’s owl trivia forever. From “Female Snowy Owls choose to breed only with males that are really white” (page 126) to the fact that Burrowing Owls decorate their nests which chunks of concrete decorations or “122 pieces of coyote scat” (page 132) to problematic issues like Japan’s “owl cafés” (page 213) or The Hedwig Problem, where Harry Potter created a bit of a global boom on illegal owls as pets. Quiet, mysterious, ever-hidden, ever-lurking, this is a wonderfully curious and scientific look into the 254 species of owls we share the planet with.
5. Birds by Kevin Henkes, illustrated by Laura Dronzek. Another book about birds but this one takes about 1/10,000th the time to read. A little girl looks out her window and describes birds from the simplest possible lens—but with enough little a-has that give the book angles and wonder. Like a quick scene when she says she sees birds sitting still on a wire for a long time and then looks back and they’re all gone or when she sees birds all take off and it looks like the tree is sneezing. Great one for your tiniest! Have it read-a-loud to you on YT right here.
6. Useful Not True by Derek Sivers. I remember way back in 2010 when I was working in Leadership Development at Walmart and this little 5 minute TED Talk went viral internally called “How To Start A Movement.” I loved it! All about the leadership of “first follower” as told through a hill of people dancing at a music festival. It was vintage Derek Sivers, though I didn’t know who Derek was at the time—with his unique blend of poetic wisdom distilled, distilled, distilled down into simple parts. The man is obsessed with simplifying! He let me use his wonderfully distilled “horse fable” in the Introduction to ‘You Are Awesome,’ my book on resilience, and I remember when his personal website was at sivers.org but he must have thought that URL was too flabby because he got it from 10 characters to 7 with sive.rs. (Btw, bookmark his “Book Notes” over there—a wonderful summary of what he’s read.) Now comes his newest book! Another slim self-published hardcover that in 88 pages takes us from “Almost Nothing People Say Is True” to “Your Thoughts Aren’t True” to “Ideas Can Be Useful, Not True” to “Adopt What Works For You.” He makes the simple point over and over: we make stuff up. That’s how we live. We adopt beliefs, we tell ourselves stories, we create realities that aren’t true—but they help us navigate through life. So, given that, we may as well make up things that help us. The idea reminds me of a familiar refrain in Cheryl Strayed’s ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ (10/2020)—that we should let go what isn’t serving us and adopt beliefs or behaviors that do. Ironically, even though Derek’s the king of simple and short writing, I did feel like I could glean the entire takeaway of this book through the chapter headlines. But for me this is a reminder book: something to set on your shelf, and face outwards, when you find yourself stuck chasing a dream or a wish or an ideal that … maybe doesn’t help you? A ”from first principles” book that’s useful to reduce guilt, inspire direction, or get unstuck.
7. Slowness: A Novel by Milan Kundera (1929-2023). I read this whole novel and am not exactly sure what just happened. I heard it described as the “most accessible” of the famed exiled Czech novelist’s works and, uh, well, now I’m scared of the rest. This is the first novel Kundera wrote in French and it’s a completely disjointed narration of a midsummer’s night with a series of abstract tales of seduction—centuries apart!—all woven together. Modern art! Hard to follow! But punctuated with moments of such clairvoyant poignancy that I alternated between frustration and delight. From page 3:
Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature?
I like that. This is my kind of guy! A wanderer of hills, a lover of nature. And then he keeps going:
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through speeds up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him at times
I learned that this particular paragraph was part of Carl Honoré’s inspiration to write the wonderful ‘In Praise of Slowness’ (5/2020), which I’m revisiting these days. A confusing, poignant, flowing funny, and genuinely weird book.
8. ‘The Anti-Social Century’ by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. Do you think that spending time on social media is… social? I know it is *social* media, but is it social the way The Olive Garden is Italian? If you think it's social, you will disagree with the thesis of this article which begins at a restaurant that permanently closes its bar after Covid and evolves into Robert Putnam-like analysis of key figures, variables, and metrics that seem to be accelerating both our loneliness pandemic and our left brain’s desire to always be alone. But our hearts and our bodies desire to be together … To hang out with friends. One key chart:
We went inside for the pandemic... and we didn't come out! Is that a problem? Yup! As Thompson writes (and the bold is mine):
...people who spend more time alone, year after year, become meaningfully less happy. In his 2023 paper on the rise of 21st-century solitude, Atalay, at the Philadelphia Fed, calculated that by one measure, sociability means considerably more for happiness than money does: A five-percentage-point increase in alone time was associated with about the same decline in life satisfaction as was a 10 percent lower household income. Nonetheless, many people keep choosing to spend free time alone, in their home, away from other people.
Not all surprising, but still shocking. The conclusion is after reading this book club—and thank you for being here—call your mom, call your dad, call your sister, call your brother, call your friends, or call your neighbors … make some plans for tonight! One new thing we're trying at home is FFF. It's “Family and Friends Friday,” at our house, every Friday. Every member of the family can bring somebody over for dinner. It's always a crazy concoction of people and seems to be helping us provoke more human-to-human friendships.
9. There is no 9! Just our regular lootbag of links. I transcribed 91-year-old former Canadian Prime Minister's recent speech about this moment. I posted my review of ‘The Let Them Theory’ over on LinkedIn. Smart phones are bad for boys too. David Perell on what's broken in education. Jefferson Fisher on Mel Robbins' show about communicating confidently. Lindyman on re-inventing yourself in the US and how it's harder elsewhere. I love George Saunders and his recent Substack post was terrific. A polluted Ontario creek is bouncing back. Bryan Johnson's new morning routine. Nick Cave on spiteful comments and friendship. And if you made it this far check out my recent chat with Emily Nagoski. Thanks for reading all the way to the end!
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 2025
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
This is the 100th issue of my monthly book club.
I emailed you the first issue back in November 2016 and have sent another on the last Saturday of every month since.
The goal remains the same! To inspire us both to read. Books, specifically. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it's hard! Attention remains the battleground. The more extreme, more violent, more shocking—the more it'll be firehosed at our faces. We know what to do—
—but that doesn't mean it's easy. Still: the richest pleasures lie way down in the deep. I talked about that with Lindyman this month. What lasts a long time will last a long time more. Family, friends, togetherness, time in nature, good walks, good food, good books.
This month let's fall into screenless Middle-earth in ‘The Fellowship of the Ring,’ connect with endangered species leaving us in ‘Last Chance to See,’ and master the ancient art of falconry with Helen Macdonald in ‘H is for Hawk.’ Of course, while reading these books I fell into attention-splintering holes. But the goal is never to be perfect. Just a little better than before.
Let's keep inspiring each other to read—just a little more.
Thank you for your attention.
I value it sacredly.
Neil
P.S. Invite others to join us here.
1. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973). My first exposure to The Lord of The Rings was through the 2001-2003 Peter Jackson trilogy which I saw down by the lake at Whitby’s fancy new AMC 24 theaters. Then when the movies came out on DVD my friends and I would watch the “Director’s Cut” versions and enjoy the side-plots while reciting some of the lines. (“These men are thirsty—bring them some mead!”). Back then I remember the Shire feeling cozy, the black riders terrifying, and the flying cameras through the mines of Moria thrilling. The first book in the trilogy looked ... thick. It was written in 1954. And since I loved the films I decided to chalk it up as "optional." That changed in 2019 when I spent a wild afternoon hanging out with Kevin The Bookseller in his tiny Indigo bookshop in the lobby of Mount Sinai hospital. Kevin is an incredible bookseller popular with staff and readers. Pinch in on his moustache!
In addition to ‘The Twits’ by Roald Dahl (7/2020) and ‘The Power of Habit’ by Charles Duhigg, Kevin decisively declared the entire LOTR trilogy as formative—and told us he was currently reading it to his kids. Well, thanks to Kevin, I spent the past eight months reading this 423-page 5-point font vintage copy of ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ and, uh, it took a while. But now The Shire has expanded from cozy to … mystical, magical, and complicated with so many twisted family histories over so many years. The black riders have grown from terrifying to … mythological, ethereal, ominous, ever-lurking. And the mines of Moria have expanded from thrilling to… dark, dismal, distressing. And the songs! So many songs. Brought to life with poetic and literary flair by Tolkien The Philogist (who once worked for the Oxford English Dictionary on, specifically, the letter W!), from so many characters, from so many backgrounds. I admit at multiple points my son screamed “I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON!”, and I felt the same way—I mean it gets dense—but it just has this floating ferry-ship feeling that rolls and rolls and rolls and rolls and you feel like you're living real-time with grand moments peppered between much longer moments of pause, confusion, or rest. The story is well-known: The Dark Lord created "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them," but oh crap—the ring got chopped off his finger! Then Gollum got it! Then Bilbo—back in ‘The Hobbit.’ (8/2022). And now from Bilbo to Frodo, who is tasked with throwing it back into the fires in Mordor where the thing was made. But the story is small here: it's the lessons learned on the way. From page 69 of my 1977 “Authorized Canadian Edition” after Frodo says Gollum deserves death for what he has done Gandalf retorts: “Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” On page 294 after the grim Council of Elrond we hear from Gimli: Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.” There is so much more texture here with endless descriptions that sound like paintings and long histories that make you want to draw out family trees. This is a big book that, if you're me and my son, you spend a long time with. I don't recommend reading it out loud but I do recommend reading it. Maybe the just-under-23hrs version on Libro or Audible! (I have no affiliation with either but use Libro since Latanya and Jerry of Bronx Bound Books told us about it. I like that you can steer the audiobook profits to the indie bookstore of your choice.)
2. The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions Of People Can’t Stop Talking About by Mel Robbins (b. 1968). I love Mel Robbins. I’ve said this maybe … 90 times? … in the 9 years since I met her back at Caesar's Palace. That’s not a lot considering how many times I’ve heard others saying it: giant ballrooms full of people standing after a big motivational speech, people scrolling in headphones beside me on airplanes smiling at one of Mel’s sassy Instagram pep talks, or even my mother-in-law who took Mel’s suggestion years ago to sign up for the ‘Growth Day’ app and who still faithfully checks in with it every morning for inspiration. Mel has this old-friend-at-your-kitchen-table knack for stirring the 1000 most common English words into something that feels akin to a slap-in-the-face followed by a hug. She never says she’s invented the tools she shares but breaks them down, down, down into simple, almost molecular, lessons which she brings to life with stories. Like the time she bought her son’s date a corsage for high school prom and after he said he didn’t want to take it and after Mel’s older daughter whispered to Mel that they didn’t really know each other super well Mel just, y’know, decided to hide the corsage in her purse, take it to the prom photo shoot, and … give it to the date anyway! While telling the date that her son didn't want her to do this. Ummm. Is your face contorted into something between crying and laughing? Mine too. Mel continues: “And that’s when I noticed she had made her own corsage, which she was already wearing on one of her wrists. [My daughter] Kendall rolled her eyes. [My husband] Chris shifted. If I could have evaporated in that moment, I would have.” And then you’re back on her team. Because can’t we all relate to a bunch of stupid and humiliating things we did? Of course we can. After the photo shoot it begins pouring and Mel is horrified at her son’s clothes getting soaked and the fact he and his friends don’t have reservations and want to take their dates to a cheap Mexican spot. When she begins to interfere again her daughter chimes in: “Mom, if Oakley and his friends want to go to a taco bar for pre-prom, LET THEM … (“But it’s too small for all of them to fit in and they’ll get soaked”) … LET THEM get soaked … (“But his new sneakers are going to get ruined!”) … LET THEM get ruined.” And now you know the Let Them Theory! But what seems braindead obvious isn’t necessarily. I mean, how often do you find yourself overly involved, worried, stressed, or upset at something somebody else said or did? Pretty damn often, right! Me too. Everyone too! So we’re meant to use this internal two-word mantra to practice acceptance, let the world keep moving, while then practicing the follow-up mantra—“Let Me”—to affect, change, or improve our own behavior instead. (On page 70 she says “Let Me is an opportunity for you to put your time, energy, and values at the center of your life.”) Like when Mel’s mom's friends all go on a vacation without her and she finds herself doomscrolling in “full stalker mode” she has to remind herself: Let Them. And then Let Me show up and reach out as a better friend than I’ve been over the past few years. Simple, right? Vintage Mel. That’s her straight talking, vulnerable friend-to-millions conversation. She talks openly about the fear of being worried what other people would think (like when she was doing keynote speeches for free but didn't want to post about them) and how to use the theory (and a great tangent called ‘frame of reference’) to work with people especially close to you. She writes about how she grew to understand her mom’s early unhappiness with Mel’s marriage because of what happened to her after she got married—namely moving away from all her family and friends to be with her hubby. I am not surprised this book just became the fastest selling non-fiction book in publishing history. It's talking to people. For scale reference ‘The Book of Awesome’ was a New York Times and #1 international bestseller for 3 straight years ... and Mel's book sold more copies in 3 straight weeks. (That would be over 800,000!) Last month I couldn’t even find a copy at any bookstore:
And then when the book came flooding back in-stock the stores had it everywhere. Front displays, front tables, every single cash register:
Why? Because we’re lonely. We’re scared. We’re anxious. We’re imperfect. We need Mel’s guiding, supportive, empowering spirit. She creates such a karmic imbalance in the world by offering so much of herself. You can almost mainline her on Instagram or YouTube. Millions do! After it didn’t work out being a life coach or CNN radio host or TV Talk Show host she’s found her Big Megaphone with The Mel Robbins Podcast (often the top-ranked podcast in the world), her Instagram feed with its 8.2M followers, and her series of rallying books. You can honestly flip this book to any page, read a couple minutes, and feel like you just got a personal pep talk. It looks so easy you don't realize it's hard. Mel Robbins: a voice for the rest of us on hard days. P.S. If you want to fall down a Mel rabbit hole here are “7 Leadership Lessons I Learned from Mel Robbins” which I wrote 5 years ago and our live 3 Books podcast together in Bryant Park 2 years ago.
3. Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl (1916–1990). I’ve been on a read-aloud roll with my third kid. We did ‘Little House in the Big Woods’ (4/2024), ‘Little House in the Prairie’ (8/2024), ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ (8/2024), and ‘The BFG’ (11/2024). Leslie’s been having fun reading him ‘Marge In Charge’ and so I felt it made sense to turn to ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ next which has to be one of the sharpest, tightest stories in the Dahl canon. Mr. Fox steals food every night from Boggis, Bunce, and Bean (“one fat, one short, one lean”) who, you know makes sense, grow frustrated and wage an escalating war on Mr. Fox and his family. Twists, turns, with wonderful illustrations from Donald Chaffin in 1970 or Quentin Blake in 1995:
Thank goodness the 2023 Puffin censors didn’t get their way in their bizarre attempts to remove the word ‘black’ as a tractor descriptor, taking out any references to height and weight, and changing Mr. Fox’s son to a daughter. An absolutely wonderful book and, I will add, I also recommend the 2009 Wes Anderson stop-motion film of the same name. 93% on RT!
4. Marge In Charge by Isla Fisher (b. 1976). Since I just mentioned ‘Marge’ and have never read it but always hear them giggling and laughing about it I thought I’d shoulder-tap Leslie for a review. Over to you Les: “I’m always looking for opportunities to laugh with our kids. Nothing clears the cobwebs and greases the gears of our relationship like a good laugh (other than also a good cry and snuggle!) and so ‘Marge In Charge’ by Isla Fisher is one of my all-time favorite read-alouds! Not only does it get kids as young as 4 laughing out loud but I find myself cracking up alongside them and it just feels so darn good. Isla Fisher, comedian and actress, wrote these books after having told the stories to her children at bedtime and you can just feel the love, creativity, and spontaneity laced through them. Marge is a rainbow-haired and retired duchess (or so she loves to say!) who falls asleep on the job babysitting Jemima and Jakey. She always somehow finishes all of the jobs on the mom’s list but in the most fantastical hilarious ways. Like when she convinces Jakey, who refuses to wash his hair, to wash his hair in the bubble-flooded bathroom and clean it all up before the parents get home. It’s light and fun and entertaining and I dare you not to laugh with your kids while reading any of the wonderful four books in the series.”
5. 1000 Hours Outside: Activities To Match Screen Time With Green Time by Ginny Yurich. Ginny Yurich wasn’t enjoying motherhood. It was September 2011 and the Michigan mom of three felt exhausted, trapped, pinned down by 12-hour stretches of “crying, screaming, diapers, noses, sweeping, one-handed cooking, and the minutia that accompanies life with little ones.” A friend mentioned that education guru Charlotte Mason says children should spend 4-6 hours outside a day. “No way,” Ginny thought. “How can anyone do that?” But she didn’t have anything to lose so figured she’d give it a shot. She packed sandwiches and took her kids to a field one morning along with that same friend. “That day changed my life,” she told me. “They played and played. They invented new games. They jumped off logs. They weren’t fighting. And I had my first adult conversation since having kids.” (She found out later this Charlotte person lived in the 1800s!) Anyway, the energy from that day powered Ginny and her husband Josh’s “1000 Hours Outside” movement which has grown from a focus on homeschooling their five kids into a viral Instagram feed, popular 1000 Hours Outside podcast, and even little coloring sheets to help the sticker-chart people among us (hi) track our progress. Which is? 1000 hours outside a year. Simple! Almost 3 hours a day. Tiny compared to our roots but massive compared to the 10-minutes-outside-a-day culture we’ve evolved into. Where does the book come in? Well, it’s a full-color, 287-page flipper offering 136 ideas for outdoor family activities conveniently organized into Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall. From “Hot Chocolate Hikes” (what it sounds like) to “Snow Hot Tubs” (putting on your bathing suit and filling a kiddie pool with hot water in the winter) to “Fairy Doors” (painted cardboard and popsicle stick ‘doors’ to put at the base of tall trees), this is a simple reminder that nature has deep powers and encourages all of us to peel ourselves off the screens.
6. All Fours by Miranda July (b. 1974). When Leslie and I first moved in together I assumed we would merge bookshelves. I had a paltry 20 or 30 but she had at least a hundred so I thought we could just sort of … sift them together. “What?,” I remember Leslie asking when I mentioned this in passing, “That would be like merging brains. That’s like—who we are. You can’t merge brains. You can't merge bookshelves.” Whoa! Time for a new Billy. But, also, looking back: props. I just hadn’t had that enlightened thought but now I definitely see the importance. Our conjoined shelves are now like vines creeping out of their pots slowly unfurling for extra space anywhere We have bookshelves on two of four walls and now it’s time to build more over the windows and down the other sides behind this picture … I mean, when you start losing the floors you know it's time:
One thing that’s fun when you have two people’s bookshelves in the same room is seeing which books you have ‘doubles’ of. Like pre-merger or post-merger you both decided this book was too important to not to individually own. Right now we have doubles of ‘A Million Little Pieces’ by James Frey, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ by Anne Frank, ‘Influence’ by Robert Cialdini, ‘How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk’ by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, and yes, as of last month, ‘All Fours’ by Miranda July. I admit my copy remains pristine as I got the pleasure of reading Leslie’s copy with her underlines and Post-It notes pasted in it (read Leslie's 8/2024 review). The book came to us in different ways. She saw it recommended in Cat and Nat's email newsletter and I bought it after getting one of those GoodReads “New Books Out This Month From Authors You Loved” emails and they both arrived before we discussed. Right away I loved the cover blurb from George Saunders: “A giddy, bold, mind-blowing tour de force.” George runs the wonderful Story Club Substack (I’m a member!) and I love the way he describes ultimate prose as ‘undeniable.’ Like you just could not imagine a sentence or string of sentences being better. Crisper, funnier, zingier? No! You cannot. Because the prose … is undeniable. I’m telling you today that Miranda July may be second only to George himself at the non-existent awards The Undeniable Prosies. She begins wooing us with the first four sentences: “Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a good opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled like this.” Jarringly self-aware, flamboyantly unhinged, unapologetically sexual, subversively funny. The book is a study in how to write a book. The way she constantly unveils our unnamed 45-year-old protagonist’s character to us is astounding. Like when on page 13 she steps away from a chat with her husband and another couple at a party and then … suddenly joins a dance floor?
There was a small group of people dancing in the living room. I moved discreetly at first, getting my bearings, then the beat took hold and I let my vision blur. I fucked the air. All my limbs were in motion, making shapes that felt brand-new. My skirt was tight, my top was sheer, my heels were high. The people around me were nodding and smiling; I couldn’t tell if they were embarrassed for me or actually impressed. The host’s father looked me up and down and winked—he was in his eighties. Was that how old a person had to be to think I was hot these days? I moved deeper into the crowd, shut my eyes, and slid side to side, shoulder first, like I was protecting stolen loot. Now I added a fist like a brawler, punching. I made figure eights with my ass at what felt like an incredible speed while holding my hands straight up in the air...
LOL. And the plot? The narrator starts off from LA on a two-week road trip to New York and back but then stops in a suburb half an hour outside town where she remodels a motel room with a young designer and then seduces her husband who is a hip-hop dancer who works at the local Hertz ... before tipping back into what this all means for her and her marriage. There are scenes in this book I could not believe I was reading. I wasn’t shocked. Too tight a word. More like I found myself out in the middle of a swinging bridge between cliff edges and had to steady myself to stare into the suddenly blinding sun and galing wind. The book swings, sways, shocks, skewers. It's titillating and tantric. I suggest starting with ‘No One Belongs Here More Than You’ (3/2022), her nearly 20-year-old collection of short stories, which was one of the collective formative books from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Sheinert, filmmakers behind ‘Turn Down For What’ and ‘Swiss Army Man.’ Miranda July writes like nobody else. A strong, fierce, rubber-band brainslap of book.
7. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (b. 1970). This book has been spying me from bookshelves since it came out in 2015. You too? That hawk—glowering from the shelf!
I had seen that cover so much but finally talon-snared it off the front display at Doug Miller Books in Koreatown. Looking closer on the cover I see it’s a painting by Chris Wormell and it’s not just a hawk either, but a Eurasian Goshawk— “bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier.” A couple years ago I was birding with my birder pal Jody out in Edmonton and he was telling me about getting attacked by a Northern Goshawk. Just swooping hard and fast at him down a forest clearing to the point he had to dive out of the way. “Really?,” I asked. “Oh yeah,” he said, bending over to focus his scope on 1000s of migrating American Avocets on a distant shore. “Goshawks are vicious, man. A friend of mine used to count their eggs for research. He looks like he’s lost a couple knife fights.” So what would compel a Cambridge professor to … raise one? To become a falconer? To master that ancient 4000 year-old art of taming your own bird of prey and training it to hunt? Well, after their father dies Helen falls into deep grief and revisits their childhood desire to become a falconer. They come up with the idea to train a goshawk as a way to, perhaps, be “feral”—to be free, to be ferocious. To come closer to life and examine it with intensity from many sides. On page 85: “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.” On page 110: “…in all my days of walking with Mabel [the hawk] the only people who have come up and spoken to us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks… ‘We are outsiders now, Mabel’, I say, and the thought is not unpleasant.” They let the hawk take over their life. On page 123: “I can’t go to Berlin in December, I’d thought, appalled. I have a hawk to fly. Ambitions, life-plans: these were for other people.” The book is a detailed literary journal that can be ominous and even spooky but is always somehow light enough to be death-examining without being a downer. Emotional lifts and tumbles left me in tears. And the entire book feels like a double-tunnel back in time a century ago as everything is paired with a Maria Popova-esque examination of T.H. White’s 1939-written (1951-published) ‘The Goshawk,’ which today may stand even higher than his other books like ‘The Sword In The Stone.’ Macdonald quotes White’s personal journals from the time which caution of a world heading to war all because “masters of men, everywhere, who subconsciously thrust others into suffering in order to advance their own powers.” History rings through this deep, exotic, mind-transplant to wet forests as you, yourself, become a falconer. And, maybe-hopefully, metabolize a bit of grief, doubt, or sadness you forgot you still had stuck inside.
8. Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams (1952–2001) and Mark Carwardine (b. 1959). I must have subconsciously been on a death-examining bender this month because here comes another one! (I guess I tend to do that?) Fact is: None of us know how long we have … as individuals nor as species as a whole. Douglas Adams left us in 2001 at 49 (ugh), long after bequeathing us his series of comic masterpieces including ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ which came out in 1979. I’d read and loved that book as a teen and knew of his other fiction but I had no idea he spent a chunk of his late 30s criss-crossing the world with a zoologist pal looking for the world’s most endangered species. Komodo dragons of Indonesia! Kakapos of New Zealand! Blind river dolphins of China! White rhinos of Zaire! Originally broadcast as a radio show on the BBC, the written result is a zippy 218-page travel diary that is by turns fun … aggravating … and poignant. Perhaps like travel in general. In the first chapter while looking for Komodos he writes:
It is then quite an education to learn that two cats fighting can make easily as much noise as forty dogs. It is a pity to have to learn this at two-fifteen in the morning, but then the cats have a lot to complain about in Labuan Bajo. They all have their tails docked at birth, which is supposed to bring good luck, though presumably not to the cats.
In the second chapter in Zaire he writes “I wasn’t disturbed so much by the ‘Oh Lord, we thank Thee for the blessing of this Thy day,’ but ‘We commend our lives into Thy Hands, O Lord’ is frankly not the sort of thing you want to hear from a pilot as his hand is reaching for the throttle.” The book is mostly journey, not destination, but Adams’ sharp and curious mind always takes us down endless rabbit holes. He tells the story of the southern white rhino’s presumed extinction in the mid-1800s and then how a group of 9 (!) of them were found fifty years later and then taken care of so their population grew to 5000. When Douglas and his group are 40 yards away from the rhino he remarks on how its “nasal passages are bigger than its brain” and then tells us that:
The world of smells is now virtually closed to modern man. Not that we haven’t got a sense of smell—we sniff our food or wine, we occasionally smell a flower, and can usually tell if there’s a gas leak—but generally it’s all a bit of a blur, and often an irrelevant or bothersome blur at that. When we read that Napoleon wrote to Josephine on one occasion, ‘Don’t wash—I’m coming home,’ we are simply bemused, and almost think of it as a deviant behaviour. We are so used to thinking of sight, closely followed by hearing, as the chief of the senses that we find it hard to visualise (the word itself is a giveaway) a world that declares itself primarily to the sense of smell.
Something you don’t think about often! But true. And hopefully one thing AI won’t replicate for a while, right? Let’s enjoy those sacred smells of your mom’s cooking or your partner’s neck or your kid's hair and sweaty cheeks when you kiss them goodnight before bed. Through Adams’ early death and the disappearing animals he’s cataloguing the book serves as a mirrory reminder of the fragility and fleetingness … of everything.
9. There is no 9! Just our regular lootbag of links. Friend of 3 Books Sahil Bloom has his first book out. I just got a copy and am excited to dig in. This episode of Brené Brown's podcast on burnout with Emily and Amelia Nagoski was transfixing and had so many great tips for the overworked among us. Does where you live impact your happiness? Adam Grant tells us why we should read more fiction. I try to avoid Meta and use the privacy-focused, donation-based, non-profit WhatsApp-alternative Signal for most of my texts and group chats. (I have no connection—just a fan and donor.) My friend Michael Bungay Stanier has a brand-new podcast focused on organizational change. I loved these incredible travel tips from Kevin Kelly. Only Canadians will understand what's happening here. A little more motivation to pick up the gym routine. And big thanks to Book Clubber Devra T. for sending me this article on how to read 100(!) pages a day.
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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - January 2025
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Hey everyone,
For most of my adult life I read 4 or 5 books a year. Not much! I read a lot as a kid but found my adult self reading newspapers, scrolling blogs, skimming Twitter.
Then I started dating someone new. She came back to my apartment and said “Where are all your books?” I had a shelf ... with not many books on it. Well, that woman is now my wife and she helped remind me how much I loved reading and how much better I feel—now as a husband, a dad, a friend, a writer—when I've intentionally spent time reading books versus letting my brain dissolve into the endless online information abyss. Today I read around 75 books a year and have a series of reading systems to keep this up.
This book club email is one of those systems! It's just a summary and review of every book I've read over the past month. I know I have to send it to you! So that keeps me reading. And I always love when you reply and share your reading list back with me.
For now: We still control our attention! So let's aim to keep turning off screens and picking up books. Let's delete social media and news media apps off our phone. Let's renew our library cards. And let's vision at the end of our lives having a giant bookshelf full of books we've read and grown from instead of a stack of old yellowed newspapers in the basement and some blurry long-forgotten scroll of soundbites and tweets.
It's harder than ever to read books these days! You help me keep the habit up and I hope I help you too. As I enter my 10th year of writing this book club I want to say thank you for being here.
Please invite others to join us here.
Now let's hit the books!
Neil
1. Balanced and Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children by Angela J. Hanscom. Parenting is hot! Suddenly everyone has a take. Tim Ferriss released back-to-back superlong chats with viral influencers Dr. Becky Kennedy (‘Good Inside’ 9/2022) and Aaron Stupple (‘The Sovereign Child’). But I have a reminder from our grandmas: There are infinite ways to parent. Hands-on, hands-off, lots of rules, hardly any, structured and inside or, in the case of this book, unstructured and outside. You do you! No one way is perfect. I think of our job as learning as much as we can—doing the best we can. Brilliant and effervescent Ginny Yurich (of 1000 Hours Outside) recommended this to me and I took so much from it. Angela Hanscom is a pediatric occupational therapist who tells us that our kids are getting fragile, frail, and fidgety because they’re sitting and staring at screens while starving their bodies of unstructured outdoor play. On page 13 she shares a study comparing kid strength from 1998 to 2008—only 10 years!—and shows the # of sit ups 10-year-olds could do bombed 27.1%, arm strength plummeted 26%, and grip strength sank 7%. Why? Not enough time climbing trees, jumping off rocks, making up their own games with their own rules. She talks about how free play develops our eyesight, our skeletal systems, and loads more. One fun example: Spinning! Do you ever see kids just ... spinning in circles ... looking completely nuts? Sure, all the time. And what do adults say? “Stop! Sit down! You could get hurt!” But “spinning stimulates the vestibular sense which helps them become more coordinated, sure-footed, and less likely to trip or run into things.” Research shows spinning “activates hair cells on the inner ear which sends motor messages through the spinal cord which helps maintain muscle tone and body posture.” Yes, your vestibular sense lays the foundation for other senses and “spinning leads to alertness, attention, and a sense of calm in the classroom.” Way back in the Internet paleolithic I wrote an essay on 1000 Awesome Things celebrating “Old, dangerous playground equipment.” Now it looks prophetic with books like this and ‘The Anxious Generation’ (4/2024) calling for a return to too-tall teeter-totters, monkey bars in the sky, and big spinners where everyone falls dizzily down the hill afterwards. The book is a little stiffly written—a little study after study after study—and, sure, I wish it had pictures or more of a freewheeling tone (like ‘Free Range Kids’ 5/2023) but it’s still really wonderful, and a much-needed reminder that many of our ails can be cured by ditching endless programs and just getting outside. How much? Well, Ginny says 1000 hours a year and she's made a bunch of handy trackers for those who want to systemize it. (You know I love the power of 1000.) Highly recommended.
2. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Did you know that in Ireland from 1765 to 1996 a series of state- and Catholic-run ‘Magdalene Laundries’ housed and locked up ‘fallen women,’ the definition of which originally meant sex workers but grew to include orphans, victims of rape or incest, any woman abandoned by her family, and any woman who didn’t conform to the rules of society? I ... did not. This 2022 Booker shortlisted book follows Keegan's 2010 stunner ‘Foster’ (9/2023) and takes a slow pan shot of a couple wintry months in New Ross, Ireland in 1985. We see the world through the eyes of a local upstanding businessman, Bill Furlong, as he wrestles with what he discovers up on the hill. Here’s the book's opening paragraph: “In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain.” You’re right there. Keegan is “as good as Chekhov,” David Mitchell says, and I agree. The book is like a poem in a play. And at 13 point font, 1.5 spacing, and 119 pages, you can actually read the whole thing quickly and feel good about yourself. Great one to kick off the year! Highly recommended.
3. Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Back in like 2010 I was sitting on my swively chair in my Walmart HR department cubicle late on a Friday afternoon. Everyone was racing off for the weekend but I was still fairly recently divorced and in no rush to head downtown to an empty apartment with no plans. I wandered the halls and stepped into a dark training room. Motion-sensor neon flickered on illuminating a whiteboard, couple easels, and an old laminate bookshelf with a couple dozen books. ‘The Tipping Point,’ ‘Good To Great,’ ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People.’ And a book I’d never heard of but was immediately drawn to ... I decided to grab it for the weekend:
I say with all sincerity that book changed my life. It helped me realize how random everything is—much more random than we think!—and how ‘black swan events’ (disproportionately huge things with big impact) are really unpredictable. So to ‘win’ at whatever you want to win in, you have to make small bets. You have no idea what'll work! Nobody does. For me that meant saying yes. Trying things! Expanding my ‘what I do’ mentality to include things like writing a kids book, giving keynote speeches, starting a podcast and, yes, writing email newsletters. Just keep trying and then you’ll eventually see what takes off—internally and externally. Well, ‘Antifragile’ is the 2012 sequel to the 2007 ‘The Black Swan’ (11/2016) and it's the final book by hedge-fund-manager-turned-philospher-king Nassim Nicholas Taleb. You can flip past seemingly endless pages of Contents and Notes to the opening paragraph which comes on page 31: “You are in the post office about to send a gift, a package full of champagne glasses, to a cousin in central Siberia.” What do you label the box? Fragile, right? But now: what’s the opposite? No, it’s not “resilient” or “robust,” because that would be for items that “neither break nor improve.” As Taleb says: “Logically, the exact opposite of a ‘fragile’ parcel would be a package on which one has written ‘please mishandle’ or ‘please handle carelessly’ ... we give the appellation ‘antifragile’ to such a package; a neologism was necessary as there is no simple, noncompound word in the Oxford English Dictionary that expresses the point of reverse fragility.” The concept is both new and old. I mean: what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right? But to enjoy, embrace, and enhance our lives with small pains—so we may improve—isn't always obvious. Taleb says fragile is the “New York Banking system” and antifragile is “Silicon Valley’s ‘Fail Fast’ and ‘Be Foolish’” adages. He says fragile is “Classroom” and antifragile is “Real life and library,” fragile is “post-traumatic stress” and antifragile is “post-traumatic growth,” fragile is “e-readers” and antifragile is “oral tradition,” fragile in finance is “short option” and antifragile is “long option.” This is the final of his four-book ‘Incerto’ set that also includes ‘Fooled By Randomness’ (2003) and a smaller book of aphorisms, with the entire series seeking to investigate “opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don’t understand the world, expressed in the form of a personal essay with autobiographical sections, stories, parables, and philosophical, historical, and scientific discussions in nonoverlapping volumes that can be accessed in any order.” He's a bit of a mouthful, right? But he’s so brilliant, and he presents the information like a tart old professor who likes to pause and wink a lot. From why you should eat vegan once a week (“Deprivation is a stressor”) to fascinating The Lindy Effect, this book is so wide-minded and feels like some kind of 14-layer dip for your brain. A good one to dip in and out of and keep applying back to your life. Highly recommended.
4. Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. This is one of Nick Sweetman’s 3 most formative books. And I love Nick Sweetman! He’s a magical graffiti artist who decorates the streets of Toronto with spray paint images of (mostly) wild animals doing wild animal things against the backdrop of our increasing concrete jungle:
I mean, look at the eye on that Hooded Merganser. Look at that beak! How does he do it? It was an honor partnering 3 Books with Nick to create a 750-square foot mural of 16 local bird species at Toronto's Dupont subway station. Here’s Nick’s Instagram post announcing the wall and the 3 Books documentary we just dropped on the full moon that just passed. (Btw I finally figured out how to disable those annoying YouTube ads from my YouTube channel so you can watch the whole thing ad-free. Since 2008 all my blog posts, newsletters, podcasts, and now YouTube videos are ad, sponsor, and commercial-free. If you want to support my stuff buy a book!) Anyway, uh, where were we? ‘Day of the Triffids’! Yes, read ‘Day of the Triffids’! A 1951 post-apocalyptic slow-paced horror show that served as inspiration for films like ‘28 Days Later.’ The book opens with everyone on earth observing an incredible “celestial spectacle” as the earth flies through some comet debris. Well, almost everyone! Our narrator was getting surgery at the hospital that day and his “eyes, indeed my whole head, should be wreathed in bandages.” But then what? Everyone goes blind the next day! Whoops! And then these giant Venus-fly-trap-like plants start taking over the earth. If you liked ‘The Chrysalids’ (2/2018), this is slower, darker, deeper, meatier. And, if you’re like Nick Sweetman, who also recommended ‘The World Without Us’ by Alan Weisman (7/2024), you maybe … on some level … find the book inspiring. As Nick says, “200 years without humans every city on earth would be gone without a trace. That is exciting to me.”
5. The Monster At The End Of This Book written by Jon Stone, illustrated by Mike Smollin. A few years ago I asked on Twitter, “What's one book you loved as a kid that's still sits on your bookshelf today?” This comes to mind first for me! (‘Sideways Stories From Wayside School’ by Louis Sacher is a close second.) My tattered hardcover still has my sister’s clunky 10-year-old name handwritten inside and we’ve had to put packing tape on the inside spine to hold it together:
I still read this book to my kids all the time. It has incredible never-ending appeal as Grover keeps begging you, the reader, to stop flipping pages, because he’s terrified of the monster at the end of this book.
Is this the OG interactive picture book? It came out in 1971! (I can squint see I have the Little Golden Book’s 22nd printing from 1982.) Maybe you could argue there was ‘Pat The Bunny’ (1940) with its stuffed cotton or ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ (1960) with its baby-finger-sized holes, but nothing really broke the fourth wall like this book and it came decades before ‘Press Here’ by Hervé Tullet or ‘Tap The Magic Tree’ by Christie Matheson. (I borrowed the concept myself with ‘Awesome Is Everywhere,’ my 2015 picture book where you ‘tap the earth’ to zoom all the way underwater and deep into the sand). I recommend not buying the (smaller) board book version of this and getting a big picture book instead where you can really fall into it. (There are good used copies on Abe or ThriftBooks). There’s just such commitment to form here. The delightfully popping images, the escalating tension, the violent smashing of brick walls and ropes—it's an action movie for five-year-olds. Highly recommended.
6. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto. A 1992 collection of essays and speech transcripts by 30-year public school teacher John Taylor Gatto who won the New York State Teacher of the Year award. Gatto is a fiery activist and I love him! It’s so refreshing hearing someone on the inside of the school system pick it all apart and put it back together again. Let’s start with the fact that he decries bells! Get rid of bells! “Indeed the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do.” He talks about how the system squashes intrinsic motivation and fills brainspace with extrinsic motivators, too. (I write about this in the “Do It For You” chapter of ‘The Happiness Equation.’) How does he put it? “By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestinated chain of command.” Fast forward from 1992 to today and now we've got views and likes and comments and shares. We have digitally altered our brains into valuing what we can see and measure over everything we can’t and don’t—like nature, time outside, eye contact, touch, and holding hands. Things like awesome things. Things that, indeed, help us become antifragile. As Zachary Slayback writes in the foreword: “The best teacher I had was one who signed passes so students could skip other classes to go to her classroom and work on whatever they wanted. The worst were those obsessed with meeting state-mandated standards.” What’s the takeaway, parents? Take your foot off the gas. Don’t worry about organized sports every night. Let your kids wander. Let them dream. Let them get bored. Let them hang around outside. Let them see and observe what's compulsory and then make space for them to do anything but.
7. The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus: A Roman Slave by Publius Syrus. Over 2000 years ago a Roman slave named Publius Syrus went from captured and shipped to successful playwright. Why don’t we know his plays? They were burned! Destroyed! Lost! Gone, forever, to the eternities. What remains are 1087 pithy aphorisms that survived millennia, many likely culled from the plays, and which today fill a 44-page pamphlet-sized book. (Yes, I am officially adding this to our “Great Books Under 150 Pages” and our “Enlightened Bathroom Reader” series.) Syrus’s messages don’t fit neatly into any category which is partly why they’re fun to read. Stoic, Epicurean, Skeptic, Cynic? No. They’re just little bonks to the brain. From #1 “As men we are all equal in the presence of death” to #2 “The evil you do to others you may expect in return” to #4 “To dispute a drunkard is to debate an empty house” to #18 “Do not find your happiness in another’s sorrow” to #19 “An angry lover tells himself many lies” to #155 “A god can hardly disturb a man truly happy” to #216 “There is no need of spurs when the horse is running away” all the way up to #1087 “Man’s life is short; and therefore an honorable death is his immortality.” I learned about this book via Lindyman who wrote about this and other books of aphorisms in his August 2024 Lindy Newsletter “Don’t Give Up On Reading Just Yet.” Publius stands the test of time. Very Lindy! Chances are we may still be reading him in another 2000 years. Highly recommended.
8. A Pattern Language: Towns – Buildings – Construction by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. Weird title, great book! Maybe this hefty 1189-page butter yellow 1977 Oxford University Press book should have been called “The Architect and Urban Planner’s Bible” or just “How To Build A City, From Scratch, With Instructions On Everything From Neighborhood Density To Window Sizes To Street Width To Park Size To Grave Site Location To Number of Bus Stops Annnnd How These And Everything Else Affect How We Live.” I skipped most of the construction bits but ate up the social and cultural stuff. Like on page 115 where the authors, who spent over a decade with a 6-person team putting this thing together, write about “Tall Buildings” in a section called “Finding Solace In The City”: “There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy … High buildings have no genuine advantage, except in speculative gains for banks and land owners. They are not cheaper, they do not help create open space, they destroy the townscape, they destroy social life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open spaces near them, and they damage light and air and view. But quite apart from all this, empirical evidence shows that they can actually damage people’s minds and feelings.” They go on to suggest a four-story limit and show cities where this works—and why. And this isn’t some lightweight saying it! Christopher Alexander received the first-ever PhD in Architecture from Harvard and went on to teach Architecture for decades at University of California, Berkeley. He and his team never stop crashing cymbals either. On page 216 he writes about the city principle of “Old People Everywhere”: “… when elderly communities are too isolated or too large, they damage young and old alike. The young in other parts of town, have no chance of the benefit of older company, and the old people themselves are far too isolated … contemporary society shunts away old people; and the more shunted away they are, the deeper the rift between the old and the young … And the segregation of the old causes the same rift inside each individual life; as old people pass into old age communities their ties with their own past become unacknowledged, lost, and therefore broken. Their youth is no longer alive in their old age—the two become dissociated; their lives are cut in two.” I thought about this book a lot—even around seeming-innocuous things like whether to invite my mom over for dinner on a busy night. The answer? Do it! This book cites a 1945 Yale University Press book on ‘The Role of the Aged in Primitive Society’ which says “Some degree of prestige for the aged seems to have been practically universal in all known societies. … Frequently the very young and the very old have been left together at home while the able-bodied have gone forth to earn the family living. These oldsters, in their wisdom and experience, have protected and instructed the little ones, while the children, in turn, have acted as the ‘eyes, ears, hands, and feet’ of their feeble old friends.” This is a massive book I have spent hours with and still feel like I have only scratched the surface. Seismic! Definitive! Even the creator of SimCity says this was one of his inspirations ... and five decades later it’s still in print. An epic tome building and building well. Highly recommended.
9. There is no 9! Just our regular lootbag of links. First up, I have not been able to get a copy of Mel Robbins's new book ‘The Let Them Theory.’ Literally every bookstore in Canada is sold out. It sold 800,000 copies in the first three weeks (!) so I'm hoping to finally find one and review it for you soon. Here are some things I've learned from Mel and here she is on 3 Books. I also talked in the intro about the challenge of reading these days and wanted to mention that if you need help try taking my friend @alexandbooks_ new course called ‘The Art of Reading.’ I love Alex's reading newsletter, too. Readers, unite! I already love walking and Dan Go has given me another reason to keep it up. A Peter Attia podcast on meaningful experiences > full savings account. Nora McInerny has a new call-in podcast. Who are you cheering for in the NFL conference championships? “You can read Siddartha 100 times and still be blown away on the 101st.” A reasonable Canadian currency discussion. Adam Grant tells us our "attention spans increase with practice." And a graph I can't stop thinking about. Lastly, if you want me in your inbox every single day you can also get my daily awesome thing—18 years running now! Thanks for reading all the way to to very end...
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Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - November 2024
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
I started writing this book club 8 years ago.
So it’s been 96 straight issues till this one. Just getting started! I’d love to do 1000. I was born September 1979 so that means I’ll hit the final issue March 2091 at a spritely 111.
We’ll still be emailing, too, me and you. We won’t let it go. Everyone will be telling us to just blink it to each other’s storage, but those are the same people who told us we should “really get on TikTok.”
Anyway, I’m joking. But thanks. For the sanity, for the conversations, for the safe space, for the never-ending chatter about books. I love your endless suggestions and replies and love this secret hiding place we can duck away from everything for a while.
Neil
PS. Invite others to join us here.
1. We The Animals by Justin Torres. For the last few years a haunting spectre loomed at the front of bookstores. I am of course speaking of the “Trending On #BookTok” table with its seeming never-ending foisting of Colleen Hoover and James Clear. No offense to Colleen and James—love those guys—but after 5 years it just felt … boring. That’s why I was excited to walk into the holiday-bedazzled downtown Toronto flagship Indigo and see they’d collapsed the #BookTok table for some new ones:
The Signed Editions table! The Ann Patchett Picks table! The Yuval Noah Harari table! I walked up to the New York Times ‘100 Best Books of the 20th Century’ table and felt immediately smug for having read a few on display like ‘Cloud Atlas’ (6/2019) by David Mitchell, ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ (10/2023) by Gabrielle Zevin, and ‘Lincoln In The Bardo’ (4/2018) by George Saunders. Then I did that un-smug thing of looking for something new. A silhouette of three young boys Peter Panning across the sky caught my eye and I picked up this flimsy quarter-inch 2011 debut novel by Justin Torres (b. 1980) and flipped to the first paragraph where it fishhooked my eyes:
We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.
Light, fire, energy, intrigue. The first of the nineteen short, unnumbered chapters sets a near-impossible high bar for pace and a certain sepia-tinged-electricity but the rest of the book keeps punching up and smacking it. Steve-Malkmussy-titled chapters like “We Wanted More,” “Wasn’t No One To Stop This,” and “Big-Dick Truck” confuse then reveal in little tales all carefully strung together. Take the 4-page “Big-Dick Truck” which shares the story of the family car breaking down and Paps finally heading to the city while the boys wait outside “snapping the yellow dandelion heads off their stems and streaking them down our arms, painting ourselves in gold, waiting for him to return.” Paps shows up in a brand new truck and thrills the neighborhood kids with its “bench seat,” “skinny, two-foot-long gearshift that came up from the floor,” and “massive side mirror jutted outward like elephant ears.” But then there is trouble:
Ma came out and stood on the stoop, looking tired and pissed. Her eyes were red and her mouth was set, puckering in on itself. She held her boots in one hand, then let them drop in front of her and sat down on the first step.
“Well, mami?” Paps asked.
“How many seats does it have?” she said, picking up a boot and jerking at the laces.
“It’s a truck,” Paps mumbled. “It don’t got seats, it got a bench.”
Ma smiled at the boot, a mean smile; she didn’t look up or look at anything besides that boot. “How many seat belts?”
The neighborhood kids started to climb down and sneak away, all the excitement receding with them like a tide.
“Why you gotta be like that?”
“Me?” Ma said, then she repeated the question, “Me? Me? Me?” Each me was louder and more frantic than the last. “How many fucking kids do you have? How many fucking kids, and a wife, and how much money do you make? How much do you earn, sitting on your ass all day, to pay for this truck? This fucking truck that doesn’t even have enough seat belts to protect your family.” She spat in the direction of the driveway. “This fucking big-dick truck.”
Damn. Again and again he pulls this off. And you gasp and laugh and shiver and wince and feel pressure in your chest and wetness in your eyes. You are right there with the boys in fistfights, empty fields, cold basements, and inside sleeping bags on dim polished office floors. Exquisite, haunting, enchanting, lyrical, tough, raw, pure. Highly recommended.
2. Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. This is one of those books I have been hearing people talk about for years and which was sitting on some dusty shelf in my brain with a label like “The OG Book on Loneliness” or “That Dissolution-of-Community Book.” But I didn't really know much about it until now. And I have to say: it’s kind of what I thought but something much more statistical and inconclusive, too. The book reads like a lovable supernerd decided to spend a year of their life in the mid-90s chasing down a phone book’s worth of endless stats about anything that could, might, or might not affect what we think of as community, connection, and culture. And then he read it all and made graphs and maps and takeaways and added his own sort of uniquely proffered insights in a hand-stitched-together way. The conclusion comes early on page 27:
For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago—silently, without warning—that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.
Statistics are fast and furious from there. I felt buried in statistics! Like “By 1965 disrespect for public life, so endemic in our history, seemed to be waning. Gallup pollsters discovered that the number of Americans who would like to see their children ‘go into politics as a life’s work’ had nearly doubled over little more than a decade” and “The proportion that agreed that ‘most people can be trusted,’ for example, rose from an already high 66 percent during and after World War II to a peak of 77 percent in 1964.” and “In the mid- to late 70s...the average American entertained friends at home about fourteen to fifteen times a year. By the late 1990s that figure had fallen to eight times per year, a decline of 45 percent…”. But the book was written in 2000 so I kept thinking “What about now! What about now!” And while most of the data is from the past few decades (70s, 80s, 90s, really) Putnam does manage to zoom up into a century long view where the whole thing is less of a decline and more of a U-curve. As in: We didn’t used to live like this, then we did, now we don’t again. So community and loneliness... cycles? And it’ll come back? Or it's gone forever? The far-past and far-future are dark and blurry! I did love the stats, though. I felt like a trivia hound with a stack of dog-eared Trivial Pursuit cards on a futon at the end of a party. Like on page 137: “… people who trust others are all-round good citizens, and those more engaged in community life are both more trusting and more trustworthy.” And “….people who trust their fellow citizens volunteer more often, contribute more to charity, participate more often in politics and community organizations, serve more readily on juries, give blood more frequently, comply more fully with their tax obligations, are more tolerant of minority views, and display many other forms of civic virtue.” The book is useful and important! Annnnnnnd also a bit outdated and unhelpful. To his credit this 20th anniversary edition includes a 2020 'Afterword' on page 415 where he asks “Has the Internet reversed the decline of social capital?” He gives a history of phones and social media, tells us he rejects techno-determinism (the idea that technology controls us, which, because of Kevin Kelly's 'What Technology Wants', I somewhat buy), buries us in another pile of statistics, and then offers… not much. He does cite a research study showing having more IRL friends skyrockets your happiness while having more online friends … does not. But this is 2020 and the research is 2013 and the world feels unrecognizable between then and now. The moral and ethical questions facing us now hit much deeper. AI, bots, apps, online everything. The book is a fascinating and valuable piece of detailed human history on the rise of loneliness in the second half of the 20th century but I wish we had someone to tell us what's going on right now.
3. The Long Walk by Stephen King. I was in the Dallas airport. It was just after lunch on a Friday. I was speed-walking from security to Gate E3 where my flight was boarding. I had flown there last night, given a speech that morning, and had dress-shirted to sweat-shirted on the highway to catch my flight home. I felt like zombieing out to Netflix on the flight. No shame in that. But then I pictured myself Ubering from the airport to dinner with my family all glassy-eyed and headachy. I felt like … reading. Something! Anything! I race into the Hudson thinking I have 30 seconds to grab a book or I’m hanging with Demetri. I see about 30 books on two low shelves and they are arranged in … bestseller list order? Fiction #1, Fiction #2, across the top, Non-Fiction #1, Non-Fiction #2 across the bottom. Ulgh. Meaty Pulitzer prize winners, Presidential memoirs, YA fantasies. No book guilt and no book shame in any of those but they were 700-page bricks. Like getting a Fred Flintstone rib-eye when you wanted a Slim Jim.
I have like a 2-hour flight home so I’m suddenly thinking maybe it’s better to just watch family videos on my camera roll or have a scotch and soda and a nap. All viable! But then I see it! At the end of the rack! Something smaller. STEPHEN KING on the cover. “45th anniversary edition!” screams a blurb. 45? That's an odd anniversary. I am 45! I pick up a book, check the copyright, and sure enough—1979. Just like me. Why are they reprinting this book I wonder? Is it a movie? No. Is it about something timely? I crack open page 1: “An old blue Ford pulled into the guarded parking lot that morning, looking like a small, tired dog after a hard run.” This is ‘The Road’ (2/2017) meets ‘The Hunger Games,’ except written before either of those. The gist: 100 sixteen-year-old boys apply to be selected to begin walking on a specific day of each year and any time anybody stops for longer than a couple pauses they are immediately shot and killed and dragged off the road. And the entire book is that walk with ‘Stand By Me’ clubhouse-like teen conversation written when Stephen King was 30. The plot races and darkens but it’s always more terse than terrifying. “The crowd cheered monotonously. Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit.” The plot seems as morally bland as a canvas but King's writing pulls off a magic trick that allows you to endlessly, and perhaps accidentally, project your own morals onto it and then feel them bouncing back to you for interpretation. The book is told in a seductive first-person-y third-person where we follow Ray Garraty—pride of Maine, where the race starts!—the long, long way. There’s nothing grotesque in the book—nothing gruesome, nothing jumping out of the forest. It’s not scary but haunting, thrilling. Highly recommended.
4. ADHD IS Awesome: A Guide To (Mostly) Thriving With ADHD by Penn and Kim Holderness. This is a book about ADHD written by a person with ADHD (Penn) and designed for an ADHD brain. I loved it. It’s like a giant color expandable instruction manual full of tiny color drawings, bits of research, personal stories, boxed-in asides (from the loving and supporting partner to a person with ADHD, Kim). Distracting and messy and factual and philosophical and jumpy and funny and empathetic and illuminating and it … somehow … all just works. This is the new ADHD classic! Penn and Kim Holderness are perhaps most famous for winning The Amazing Race and creating viral videos like my favorite June 2020 “Hamilton Mask-up Parody Medley.” Did you like ‘Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader’ as a kid? This is like the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader of ADHD. Like a mashup parody, Penn doesn’t soar through 19 chapters with titles like “Charge Your Battery,” “Master Your Daily Routine,” and “Taking Care of Caretakers” pretending to be the who’s who and what’s what of ADHD. He doesn’t profess unique academic insights gleaned from years of study nor proffer clever acrostics featuring the “7 benefits of ADHD.” He’s just a curious wide-eyed, wide-minded ball of energy who’s taken a deep amount of time to understand his over-20-year-old diagnosis of ADHD. He has done this through interviews with leading researchers, sharing insights from his own readings and experiences at home, and clearly done a lot of self-examination. The result is an ADHD Almanac. A collection of all the stuff we know about ADHD that could help you and your loved ones. (Including, fun fact, that ADHD itself is horribly titled—that both Ds are wrong and it’s neither a deficit nor a disorder—so researchers including Edward Hallowell, who wrote the 1994 ADHD book ‘Driven To Distraction’ as well as the foreword here, are trying to change it to VAST for ‘Variable Attention Stimulus Trait’). I have ADHD in my family (some official, some unofficial) and this book has been a wonderful read on many levels. In the Introduction there is a warm-hearted “Note from People Who Have ADHD to People Who Don’t Have ADHD” with points like “1. We love you—even if it may not always look that way to you. and 2. The easy things are sometimes the hardest things for us to do.” In chapter 1 Penn writes that “a typical person with ADHD will have challenges with listening, completing tasks, and keeping track of time (and possessions). They’ll be restless, always ‘on the go’, talkative, and impatient.” Sound like anyone you know? On page 42 in the chapter titled “Inside the ADHD Brain” Penn tells us that “At its core, the ADHD brain is wired to seek stimulation… While the typical understanding of ADHD suggests that people who have it are overstimulated, the ADHD brain is actually chronically understimulated.” He then quotes YouTuber Jessica McCabe (who runs the viral channel How To ADHD) who says that ADHD brains are attracted to “1. Novelty, 2. Challenges, and 3. Things of personal interest.” The book bounces along and offers magazine-like asides and tangential columns. On page 61 Penn offers his “personal tweaks I’d suggest to make life more ADHD-friendly” and he includes suggestions like “restaurants don’t take reservations”, “schools have 20-minute class periods”, and “every product comes with a warranty that covers straight-up losing it”. On page 82 he shows that most ADHD benefits are not teachable (creativity, hyperfocus, intuition, determination) while its downsides are manageable (inattention, impulsivity, hyperactivity). He openly shares his own experience with ADHD medication, why it didn’t work for him, while completely supporting your own path and showing there are many. Perhaps the best advice of all comes in Chapter 19’s “Listening: The Best Hard Habit” where Penn accurately writes about the pains of interruption and teaches mental games and 'escape room phrases' that ADHD brains can play to observe and improve their listening skills. ‘ADHD is Awesome’ is awesome. Highly recommended.
5. The BFG by Roald Dahl. I’m on a read-aloud roll with my just-turned-6 year old. He loved ‘Little House in the Big Woods’ (4/2024), mildly enjoyed ‘Little House on the Prairie’ (8/2024), and then loved ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ (8/2024). So what next? Leslie is currently reading ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ with him (her first time!) and I felt like it might be good to do another Roald Dahl. But which one? ‘James and the Giant Peach’? ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox?’ I think ‘Matilda’ (3/2020) and ‘The Twits’ (7/2020) seem too old. Then it hit me! ‘The BFG’! I don’t think I’ve read it since I was a kid and I’d forgotten how spooky the opening scene was with tiny Sophie waking up in the middle of the night and walking to the cold second-story window of her orphanage before spotting a TWENTY-FOOT TALL GIANT down the street, a giant which proceeds, in painful, terrifying chapter after chapter, to peek through her window and snatch her up. (“If you can think of anything more terrifying than that happening to you in the middle of the night, then lets hear about it,” Dahl jovially intones on page 17.) After being kidnapped Sophie discovers nine other giants who all run all over the earth to snatch and gobble down kids for dinner every night. And if they saw her she’d be eaten immediately! Her bones violently crunched! But, luckily, she partners with the Big, Friendly Giant to concoct a secret dream mixture which they then run over to Buckingham Palace and pour in into the Queen’s ear while she’s sleeping and then the Queen wakes up and orders all the scary giants captured and dropped into a big hole! Funny, suspenseful, full of fear and cheer. I’m adding it to my new Best Read-Aloud Books List. Now: What do you suggest we read next? Just reply and let me know.
6. Revenge of the Librarians: Cartoons by Tom Gauld. If you love books you’ll love this book. A couple hundred pages of book-themed, writer-themed, reader-themed big rectangle-page-long cartoons that are like some literary blender brew of ‘Herman’ and ‘Bizarro.’ On page 21 he splits his single panel into five thin vertical frames titled “Waiting For Godot To Join The Zoom Meeting” which closes with them agreeing to go before the final caption “They Do Not Leave The Meeting.” He offers “Novels Edited and Republished For The Time-Pressed Modern Reader” featuring “One Hundred Minutes of Solitude” and “20 Leagues Under The Sea.” A single panel frame offers a silhouetted person in a bookstore asking a silhouetted pony-tailed bookseller “Can you recommend a big, serious novel that I can carry around and ignore while I’m looking at my smartphone?” And, of course, there’s his “Advice On Caring For Your Books That Also Works For Parenting” including “Take special care not to damage the spine,” “Do not let too many pile on top of one another,” and “Only lend them to reliable friends.” Published in 2022 it includes many pandemic related strips that made me shudder in memory but overall a wonderful slew of book-themed cartoons that I loved.
7. Stitches: A Memoir by David Small. I don’t think I have ever come across a graphic novel before with one of those little metallic stickers saying “National Book Award Finalist.” I tore through this fifteen-year-old 329-page masterpiece in a breathless 45 minutes. And then before the end of the month I’d picked it up and done it all over again. “I was six” and “Detroit” are the only four words found on the 17 panels spread over the first six pages. The frames zoom in and out, fast and emotionally jarring. It’s an autobiography told in a few trauma-laced stories. There are his mom’s “furious, silent withdrawals” and his dressing up as Alice from ‘Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland’ (4/2019) to sing on the school playgrounds before bullies find him as well as visits to his horrifying grandmother’s house (“You durn little fool!”). Endless emotional clashes that leave you lurching from shame to fear to joy to, well, back to shame again. But the thrilling ride is worth it. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… the man who never reads lives only one” reads a quote from Jogen in ‘A Dance with Dragons’ by George R. R. Martin. Reading this book, and reading it again, certainly feels like living another one. Thank you David Small for this exquisite and soulful deep share. Highly recommended.
8. The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance by W. Timothy Gallwey, with a foreword by Pete Carroll, then-head football coach at USC. I have heard this 1974 classic referred to as the original book on sports psychology. But it’s really just about psychology. Your inner voice. Your inner critic. Taming that inner demon. I first spotted it on the remainder table at BMV Books and then read it on a flight to Memphis back in 2017. It’s a great pick-it-up-again book. On page 1 Gallwey sets down his thesis—that everybody talks about playing sports without talking about the *inner* game—the one that “takes place in the mind of the player, and it is played against such obstacles as lapses in concentration, nervousness, self-doubt, and self-condemnation.” He shares that the “secret to winning any game is not trying too hard” and that “too much instruction is worse than none.” How do you do that? By practicing non-judgmental awareness—separating what happened from what you think about what happened. He goes on about this for a while but the examples and stories really bring it to life. Near the end, on page 120, he reminds us that: “Winning is overcoming obstacles to reach a goal, but the value of winning is only as great as the value of the goal reached. Reaching the goal itself may not be as valuable as the experience that can come in making a supreme effort to overcome the obstacles involved. The process can be more rewarding than the victory.” Indeed! I said 5000 words ago that I wanted to do 1000 of these monthly book clubs up to age 111. If I make it? Great! If I don't? Well, the process is more important than the victory. The book taps back into the way most people used to play sports and also serves as a gentle reminder that the person who has the most fun wins. Highly recommended.
9. There is no 9! Just our regular loot bag of links. Australia just banned social media for people under 16. Librarians are burning out. Colorectal cancer is on the rise so ask your doc about doing an at-home (non-invasive) FIT test to help with early detection. Ugh, and potentially related, more terrible things about forever chemicals. Over the pandemic cycling skyrocketed in Toronto and the city was covered in a fresh lattice of bike lanes. Now the province is trying to quash the City of Toronto's wishes & scrap them! I donate to CycleTO and shared bike lane thoughts on the ever-toxic Twitter. (Btw: Is BlueSky any better? I just opened a BlueSky account to find out...). George Saunders tipped me off to this cool “personalized book reading list with donation” offer from literary mag n+1. Jonathan Haidt was on CBS talking about how technology is changing society. Speaking of, I thought Rich Roll did a great job interviewing Yuval Noah Harari. I enjoyed this NYT profile on “Lindyman” Paul Skallas and he writes the eye-opening The Lindy Newsletter, too. I was Michael Bungay Stanier's last-ever podcast guest on 2 Pages—talking about ‘A Fraction of a Whole’ (2/2023) by Steve Toltz. And, finally, the publisher has just done a fresh reprint of my shiny golden book ‘The Book of (Holiday) Awesome’—click the pic below to grab a copy.
photo by @thebookbagblog
