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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:
