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Hey everyone,
It feels like the world is cleaved in two again.
I’m in one of the countries where case counts are hitting record highs, shops and schools are firmly shut, and vaccine rollout is sluggish. I think a lot of us up here feel like this sheep.
Sending love and energy to those of you in a similar boat. Hang in there.
Here are my book recommendations this month,
Neil
1. The Good Little Bookby Kyo McClear. A book for the budding bibliophile in your bubble. I think you’ll love this simple picture book about a boy sent to the study as punishment. He’s frustrated and upset and then out of boredom he picks up a book -- drawn inside exactly like this book’s cover – and it completely absorbs him. “The book the boy thought couldn’t do anything did many things. It carried him to the deep sea and steered him towards a faraway land. It dazzled him and stumped him and made him laugh and gasp.” In the end, he loses the book and then later rediscovers it living a long life with other children. Will help remind you why you love reading. This book is not popular or well-known and yet: that’s kind of the point, I think. Beautiful and highly recommended. (PS. I also recommend Kyo McClear’s completely unrelated urban birding memoir about small beauty called Birds. Art. Life.)
2. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbableby Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A black swan event is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable, it carries a massive impact, and after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable than it was. (Examples are things like 9/11, the advent of the smartphone, or ‘how I met my spouse’. I was going to add ‘coronavirus’ but apparently Taleb disagrees so I feel I should defer to him). I read this book years ago and revisited it this month. It changed so much for me. I started making myself more open to black swan events in my own life. How? Try lots. More than you think you can. Put yourself in new situations. Go to parties where you don’t know anyone. Recognize the massive role chance really plays in everything and simply expose yourself to as much variety possible – create space for black swans to appear. As he writes in the Prologue: “The reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or ‘incentives’ for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many black swan opportunities as you can.”
3. The Art of Flaneuring: How to Wander with Intention and Discover a Better Lifeby Erika Owen. One of the many things I first learned from TheBlack Swan was the word ‘flâneur’. On page 21 Taleb writes “…[I] organized myself to do minimal but intense (and entertaining) work, focus only on the most technical aspects, never attend business ‘meetings’, avoid the company of ‘achievers’ and people in suits who don’t read books, and take a sabbatical year for every three on average to fill up gaps in my scientific and philosophical culture … I wanted to become a flâneur, a professional meditator, sit in cafés, lounge, unglued to desks and organization structures, sleep as long as I needed, read voraciously, and not owe explanation to anybody.” Sound good, doesn’t it? Strolling, sauntering, aimless walking, letting thoughts naturally bubble, stopping to inspect and record them as you see fit. So when one of you in our Facebook group said there was a whole book on flâneuring? I bought it right away. It sounded too good to be true! And, sadly, turns out it is. Nice premise and the sub-title and the opening chapter on history of the term was interesting but from there the book quickly devolves into a long magazine article. Like the 25-pages of the writer’s friends writing back to her email asking what inspires them to walk. Or the chapter on what to pack for a picnic. Or the chapter on ‘how to cyberflâneur’ from your home office. (Pretty sure that doesn’t work.) I am still looking for a great book on walking. Do you have one you recommend? Just reply and let me know.
4. Planet Omar: Accidental Trouble Magnetby Zanib Mian. A wonderful chapter book featuring Omar, his big sister Maryam, his little brother Esa, and his mom and dad. A fairly standard narrative about fitting in at a new school but the real magic is the gentle and accessible introduction to Muslim culture and traditions.
5. Brokenby Jenny Lawson. Do you suffer from anxiety disorder? Depression? Intrusive thoughts? Obsessive compulsive disorder? Voluntary hair pulling? Avoidant personality disorder? Any of the above? Well, Jenny Lawson suffers from all of the above. Tuberculosis too, according to her new book. This is Jenny’s third full-length book (Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Furiously Happy) and she’s now steering deeply into the worlds of mental health. Her essays rollercoaster you six different ways before exploding in endings that will leave you laughing or crying … or both. It makes sense that Jenny has become a global mental health leader through her blog TheBloggess.com and her new Nowhere Bookshop in San Antonio, Texas. Listen to Jenny and I chat about mental health and formative books on 3 Books -- here's the link to Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
6. Where The Wild Things Go: How animals navigate the worldby Kathryn Schulz. Kathryn Schulz won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for her New Yorker feature article “The Really Big One” about the potential earthquake coming to the Pacific Northwest. This time she tunes her ecological sensibilities onto the fascinating world of how animals navigate the world. An utterly absorbing read. Here’s the full piece.
7. This Is How It Always Isby Laurie Frankl. (This month’s Leslie’s Pick!) A wonderful story of Rosie and Penn, parents of four boys, as they welcome their fifth son, Claude, who quickly becomes their daughter, Poppy. As you read about their journey to support their child, questioning their parenting decisions constantly and coming back time and time again to love as the answer, it will make you reflect on the ups and downs of loving the people you love. The book gave me comfort in the fact that it's truly never easy and straightforward. This is literally how it always is. It made me laugh, made me cry, and made me feel less alone on the wild ride of parenthood. – Leslie
8. The Famous Five #1: Five On A Treasure Islandby Enid Blyton. Pop quiz! Who’s the world’s fourth most translated author of all time after William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, and Jules Verne? If you said Enid Blyton, you win. Me, I’d never heard of her – despite the staggering 800 million books she’d sold. Yet we’ve been combing the back shelves of the library lately and out popped this 21-book series. There’s apparently a lot of controversy about Enid and she sounds like a real personality – playing a lot of nude tennis and writing 50+ books a year in a subconscious stream of consciousness approach – but to me this was just a nice little chapter book to slip into. Bit of a dark turn at the end so I’d recommend it for age 8 and up.
9.The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: A Commemorative Pop-Up Bookby L. Frank Baum and Robert Sabuda. Robert Sabuda is an ‘artist and paper engineer’ who created this absolutely stunning pop-up book of The Wizard Of Oz to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the book. This is an incredibly absorbing piece of art using text from the original book and all kinds of surprises including spinning cyclones and gigantic hot air balloons. Watch this YouTube video for the full effects.
10.Goodbye, againby Jonny Sun. I first learned about Jonny Sun through a 2017 New York Times Magazine feature called “A Whimsical Wordsmith Charts a Course Beyond Twitter.” His background fascinated me: the guy had grown a half a million meme-loving following on Twitter … almost as kind of an experiment doing his PhD at MIT. A young and accomplished playwright, architect, designer, engineer, illustrator of a Lin-Manuel Miranda book, and scriptwriter for Bojack Horseman. Who is this guy??? Well, in this wonderful collection of small, delicate essays I feel like I’ve finally found out. An Asian-Canadian hyper-productive, openly-anxious, big-thinking artist with a beautifully unique perspective on issues large and small – especially those growing up amidst this constant race to produce and shine. Here are a few lines from his essay “Unnatural words” to give you a taste: “I have tried to become more attentive to words that treat natural elements of ourselves as currency: ‘paying attention,’ ‘spending time’, ‘wasting energy.’ That ‘free time’ as a concept is so natural to us means that we have told ourselves, we have agreed on the fact that, by default our time is to mean something, is to have value, to be worth something, or is to be earned. … I have tried to catch myself whenever I use words and phrases like this, but they feel so engrained in my way of thinking. It feels so expected of us to convert ourselves into currency and spenders and buyers that these words come across as entirely natural when really they are anything but. When I do catch myself, I try to use other words – ‘giving my attention’, ‘sharing my time’, ‘using my energy’ – but it feels so instinctively strange to use words that do not promise that I get something in return…” I loved this book. Jonny is my most recent guest on 3 Books. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
11.Park Benchby Chabouté. I have been sitting on a lot of park benches during the pandemic. Picnic tables, too. With coffee shops closed I’ve been working outside and developing a deeper appreciation for shared public spaces. This beautiful graphic novel tells the story of a park bench. There are no words in the entire book. Lovers etch initials, toddlers learn to walk, teenagers skateboard. As Jane Jacobs said: “By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” A quiet, beautiful, and strange book. I loved it.
12. Imagine It!: A Handbook for a Happier Planetby Laurie David and Heather Reisman. Heather Reisman is 72 years old and talks faster than an auctioneer. I am in awe of her energy and passion. When she’s not leading Indigo, one of the world’s largest bookstore chains which provides a cultural backbone coast to coast in Canada, she’s executive producing documentaries like The Social Dilemma and Fed Up and is now teaming up with Laurie David (producer of An Inconvenient Truth) to put out this accessible “how” book on environmental activism. A wonderful little guide for kids or grown-ups looking to reduce their footprint.
13. The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deathby Corrine May Botz. A wealthy grandmother named Frances Glessner Lee founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936 and later was made captain of the New Hampshire police. She had an eye for detective work and spent a ton of her personal fortune building eighteen dollhouses based on actual crime scenes. They were all built to a perfect “1 inch equals 1 foot” scale and include ridiculous details like pencils that actually write, actual correct headlines on tiny newspapers, and blinds that open and close. And the dollhouses are still used in forensics and detective training today. This book is a series of photographs of these fascinating, dark dollhouses. How did I discover this book? Well, Jenny Lawson told me to read it. It spawned a dollhouse therapy project for her as well. Great coffee table book for your inner criminologist.
