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Hey everyone,
It’s that time of the year again when everyone says it’s that time of the year again. Usually topped with something like “Can you believe it’s September? How did that happen?” Well, it happened! And I believe it. Don’t you? Time is the most reliable thing we got. Sure, maybe it’s just a grand ruse we made up to simpify everything, but if we can’t believe in time… we’re in trouble. It’s finite. It’s fleeting. And we only have around 30,000 days total.
So it's on us to make sure we read the best books we can from the tiny number we’ll ever be able to read. I hope this monthly reading club helps with that. As George R.R. Martin wrote: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… the man who never reads lives only one.”
Neil
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1. The Bonfire of the Vanitiesby Tom Wolfe. What’s the biggest movie you’ve never seen? My wife’s never seen Star Wars. For me it’s Back to the Future. Huge movie! Never seen it. Why do I mention it? Well, because I like to call any huge book I’ve never read one of my “Back to the Future Books.” I’d put Catch 22 and The Count of Monte Cristo and, yes, The Bonfire of the Vanities in there. I’ve heard about Bonfire forever! Never read it until this month. And when I finally opened this gripping, breathless, searing portrait of rising inequalities between the highest highs and lowest lows of Manhattan in the 1980s I was just left wondering: “Why did it take me so long?” Highly, highly recommended. A fantastic novel. (Sidenote: Here's The New York Times obituary for Tom Wolfe who died earlier this year.)
2. Bedtime FM Storytime Podcast. Not a book! A podcast. We’ve become addicted to this one with our kids. Huge slew of age-appropriate stories to get you through a long car ride or rainy afternoon.
3. If On A Winter’s Night A Travelerby Italo Calvino. This novel was written in Italian almost forty years ago and somehow keeps bumping into me today. A friend bought it for me over a decade ago. An upcoming guest on 3 Books chose it as one of his three most formative books. And everything all added up for me to finally tackle it. And it is an incredible hook. The book is written in the second person (like a Choose Your Own Adventure or Mohsin Hamid’s excellent How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia) where “you” are the key character. Unlike those other second-person books, though, you aren’t parading through jungles or Pakistani slums. You are the you sitting on the couch reading the book “If on a winter’s night a traveler.” Bit meta? Yeah, and that’s just the starting point. The book has all kinds of mirrored hallways that you keep bumping into. I threw it on my bedside table in frustration a few times and skipped forward to read the last chapter, then the second last chapter, before coming back to where I was and moving forward from there. I also skipped the middle fifty pages. I "ate" this book more than read it but, like we say in our values, "Quit more to read more."
5. Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One Of The World’s Fittest Men, and Discovering Myselfby Rich Roll. When people ask me for podcast recommendations I always recommend The Rich Roll Podcast. Why? Because Rich oozes an articulate wisdom that scratches carefully yet urgently at what really matters in life. I honestly don’t normally go for the “how I changed my life” memoirs as I often find them contrived and sorta syrupy. “You can rise out of the slums with one leg to conquer Kilimanjaro, too!” No. I can’t. And I don’t want to. Yet somehow Rich’s story about hitting rock bottom with severe alcoholism, zapped athletic potential, and a failed marriage hit me hard. It’s a wonderful tale told with Rich’s brilliant voice loud and center channel the whole time. I can’t say I disagreed with where the book ends up going near the end (into the world of super healthy living and veganism) but I just wasn’t ready for it yet.
6. Why Birds Matterby Jonathan Franzen. I’ve talked about my new love of bird watching a few times on this email list. We spotted a hawk in our backyard a few weeks ago and I spent hours looking up the species in bird books and telling everyone about it. So it was gratifying to stumble upon this January 2018 National Geographic cover story written by the wonder Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, Freedom) that somehow articulated everything I love about birds. Link goes to complete article. A beautiful read. PS. Did you know Audobon and National Geographic declared 2018 “The Year of the Bird” because it’s the 100-year-anniversary of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act?)
7. Bright Shiny Morningby James Frey. It feels so liberating to give a huge shoulder shrug to what anybody thinks or thinks they think about James Frey (“Didn’t he scam Oprah?”, “Wasn’t his memoir fake?”) and just dive deeper into his phenomenal books. The writing is jagged, raw, and incredibly fast-paced and whenever you put the book down it feels like you just stepped off a roller coaster. After reading this incredible novel – which offers a birds-eye view of contemporary Los Angeles with zooms into all its cracks and fissures – I did feel like going back and understanding what really happened with all the hub bub surrounding A Million Little Piecesand this Vanity Fair article was the most thorough overview of the entire thing. Great way to get closer to that wild publishing phenomenon for those interested.
8. Hyperfocusby Chris Bailey. I first met Chris in a hotel lobby in Ottawa a few years back. It was a bustling five-star hotel with business-people in powersuits urgently walking by with briefcases in every direction and yet there was Chris wearing super casual clothes lying down with his feet up (with his feet up!) on one of the fancy leather couches… leafing through a book like he was on a basement futon. I immediately loved how confident and comfortable he was in his own skin. The man has been on a mission for years (since his popular blog and first book The Productivity Project came out) to squeeze the most juice from the lemon of life. And his new book Hyperfocus: How To Be More Productive In A World of Distraction is an elegant continuation on this trendline.
9. The Secret Lives of Colourby Kassia St. Clair. Did you know blue used to be for girls and pink was for boys? Me neither! But it wasn’t that long ago. Less than a hundred years. Red was for kings, warriors, and cardinals. So pink was the “little king.” And blue? Color of the Virgin Mary for a couple thousand years. And! Did you know orange (the color) is actually named after, hundreds of years after, orange (the fruit)? They used to call it “red-yellow” before that. Ever wondered about the origin of fuscia, electric blue, or sepia? Well, our Enlightened Bathroom Reading Series continues with this gem. Each of the seventy-five colours highlighted (literally) in this book tells a little story of how its life leads us to its place in the world today. Masterful!
