On the podcast, I feel like we’re in a wonderful flow. Today's the full moon — this minute actually, look up! — so I'll send a letter about it to those of you on my 3 Books email list after lunch with details. Upcoming guests include Celine Song, Susan Orlean, Jonathan Franzen, Maria Popova. As always, if you have a guest suggestion, just give me a shout at 1-833-READ-A-LOT. (Yes, this is my phone number.)
And now, as we’ve done every month since October 2016, here is every single book I read this month along with my honest review. Few were tough to write this month. I don't love trashing Harry Potter. But, as always, nobody can buy their way onto my book club and nobody can buy their way off.
Know someone who'd like to join our reading or hopeful-to-read-more tribe? Just forward them this email. Howdy, newcomer! Great to be with you and you can sign up right here.
Now let’s hit the books…
Neil
1. The Trial by Franz Kafka. “No one’s got Kafka these days,” Patrick told me recently, petting his cat behind the counter at the underground used bookstore mecca Seekers. “Can’t keep him in stock. Nobody can. Hits too close to home these days.” Could that be true? No used bookstore in all of Toronto has anything written by the 1883-born Franz Kafka? This is a guy who instructed his buddy Max to burn all his unpublished books after he died. Max, sharp dude, did the opposite. I went hunting in a few used bookstores – gotta buy Kafka used, I figured! – but eventually caved in and went online to AbeBooks to find the 1954 edition of the 1925 publication of the 1914 written book that sounds like a 100-year-in-the-future prophecy of our low-trustsurveillance state. First sentence sets the scene: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K. for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Why? “We are not authorized to tell you that,” say the cops, who are mercilessly beaten in a closet later on. This is a slowly-closing-in-on-all-sides tale of foreboding. Can you imagine being arrested by a remote, inaccessible authority, without your crime being revealed to you? Maybe doesn't seem as farfetched as it should! There's a reason kafkaesque became a word, after all. Max stitched the chapters together from Franz’s handwritten scraps so chapters do feel occasionally ... stitched together. But it does all add up to a highly engrossing, wonderfully paced, increasingly bleak book that gave me skin-crawling anxiety. Yet there is art in the bleakness! Reflection and thundering thematic resonance across space and time. Highly recommended.
2. 150 Bookstores You Need to Visit Before You Die by Elizabeth Stamp. Lots to like about this book! Lots to not like, too. But let’s start with the positive: It's a beautiful, colorful collection of some of the world’s most stunning bookstores, paired with a 200-ish word writeup mentioning what makes each unique – from the “Winnie Mandela mural” (Cheche Books, Nairobi, Kenya), Pacific Northwest section (Arundel Books, Seattle, Washington), or unique, store-made stationary (Podpisnie Izdaniya, St. Petersburg, Russia). Cliffside bookstores! Main Street Mississippi bookstores! Glass boxes in the middle of Chinese jungle bookstores! Everything’s here! Or: so it seems. Then you look closer. And realize it's not. So that’s my quibble. The book just isn’t in any way … authoritative. Like here in Toronto, for instance. We’ve got one bookstore featured from the city. Great! But, no offense to Queen Books, they picked the wrong one. Type Books, which Queen Books is clearly based on, is not featured – but Type is superior. More history, more events, more weird genres (“Plotless Fiction” becoming so culty they’ve stamped it on T-shirts now.) Or what about the four-story baby-blue behemoth BMV? Way more of a standout on the Toronto bookstore scene, with its entirely-graphic-novel attic, basement full of vintage 70s pinup mags, and lock-and-key rare book glass shelves featuring $700 dictionaries. And no Monkey’s Paw? Come on. There’s a reason Monkey’s Paw is featured in Atlas Obscura. The place sells “Old and Unusual Printed Matter” and has the world’s only Biblio-Mat – an incredible book vending machine! How do you skip any of those for newbie Queen Books? Or Parnassus Books in Nashville, or The Painted Porch in Bastrop, or Nowhere Bookshop in San Antonio? How do you miss them? By… uh, not visiting. Yes, upon closer inspection, the book is written by Elizabeth Stamp, about whom we get 0 biographical info. Is she a bookseller? Book tourist? Book anything? Where does ... she live? Nobody knows! (I googled her and the answer is none of the above.) Stamp just picked, according to the intro, “bookstores I’d want to visit.” Ohhhhh. Want to visit. That’s why the Photo Credits at the back have a slew of iStockPhotos. Booooooooo! I give credit to Belgium-based Lannoo Publishing. They’ve figured something out. I know this book will look pretty on coffee tables but we need someone to fly around the world for a few years to put together something better. Who’s up for the job?
3. Great Plains by Ian Frazier. On the inside flap of this journalistic masterpiece are two faded-orange maps. The one on the left shows the “Great Plains c. 1850” with Coronado’s 1541 trail, Lewis and Clark’s 1804-1806 trail, and Parkman’s 1846 trail curling through Blackfeet, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Comanche country. The one on the right shows the “Great Plains Today”, with the same geography now labeled top-to-bottom with Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. And, instead of Lewis and Clark, we get “Frazier’s Route”, with the New Yorker humorist’s black-lined 25,000-mile routemap circling these states top to bottom, around and through, as he drove through them in the 80s. Booktuber Ariel Bissett once told us that books are places – taking you somewhere you’ve never been and leaving you with a satisfying sense of visiting afterwards. In this book, a local helps you through barbed wire fences, a radio announcer comes on and says “… if there’s anything you don’t want blown away, you better tie it down”, laundromat signs scream “Do Not Wash Rig Clothes Here”, and “a spider as big as a hand crosses the pavement.” Part travelogue, part David Sedaris diary (3/2022), this is a wondrous, mind-everywhere book that feels like a long road trip. You’ll feel the sun, you’ll feel the wind, and you’ll never want to run out of gas. Highly recommended.
4. The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonathan Franzen. Between his monumental 2001 National Book Award-winning 'The Corrections' and his monumental 2010 Oprah-and-Obama-praising 'Freedom', Jonathan Franzen quietly released a slim sub-200-page memoir told in six essays. I recommend this for anybody who’s gorged on Franzen’s fiction and wonders about the inner life that’s conjuring up his magic shows. Ultimately, the life story is kind of, you know, normal. Geeky kid grows up in St. Louis suburbs, with a couple older brothers, plays pranks in school with his buddies, falls in love with birds. But the magic here is in his frankness, bluntness, honesty, and poetic, dark asides, like this paragraph about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer: “Fabulous to be a defense contractor, shitty to be a reservist, excellent to have tenure at Princeton, grueling to be an adjunct at Queens College; outstanding to manage a pension fund, lousy to rely on one; better than ever to be bestselling, harder than ever to be mid-list; phenomenal to win a Texas Hold ‘Em tournament, a drag to be a video-poker addict.” Franzen’s keen eye turned inwards for the superfans.
5. Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis. According to the Chronicles of Narnia 'Reading Order’, this is the second book to read in the 7-book Narnia series. Start with ‘The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe’! (3/2018) First one, big one! That book came out in 1950, takes place in 1940 (Earth time), and 1000 (Narnia time). This book, ‘Prince Caspian’, came out in 1951, takes place in 1941 (Earth time), and 2303 (Narnia time). Bit of a bummer for the four Pevensie siblings to discover when they get back to Narnia the kingdom they once ruled (after defeating the White Witch in book one) has fallen into disarray. Animals hiding! Land dark! But, luckily, Prince Caspian escapes his evil stepfather, finds the talking animals, and then they all team up with the Pevensies to stage an epic battle to rule the kingdom. Not as good as the first book, I have to say. Maybe it only felt paint-by-numbers to me because it was the paint for so many fantasy series to follow. But I came away missing the rolling, swelling, poetic writing in ‘The Hobbit’, and ultimately this book helped me steel myself to finally tackle ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ Are you on Team CS or Team JRR? Kevin the Bookseller sold us hard on Lord of the Rings in that wild bouncing-around-a-bookstore chat we had back in Chapter 44. I do feel my allegiances growing to Team JRR. One series to rule them all, one series to find them...
6. Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future by Dale Jamieson. You got a great brain. Me too, if I do say so myself. We all own one of these extremely handy objects that are good at so many things! Unfortunately, solving climate change just isn’t one of them. “Evolution built us to respond to rapid movements of middle-sized objects,” writes Dale Jamieson, “not to the slow buildup of insensible gasses in the atmosphere.” Indeed. Climate change was international news 75 years ago! There was momentum. Summits! Pledges! Signatures from heads of state saying yes, yes, yes, we’ll reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. What’s happened since? The … exact opposite. The earth is heating up fast. Rising sea levels are soaking coastal cities. Climate migration is spiking. Weather patterns are in disarray. We didn’t even get snow this winter in Toronto! Why? Well, “climate change poses the world’s largest collective action problem. Each of us acting on our own desires contributes to an outcome we neither desire nor intend.” This is a necessary, detailed, devastating story of our increased awareness of human-created climate change, our failed attempts to do anything about it, and what happens next. It’s not simple! After opening with “The Nature of the Problem” and “Obstacles to Action” (which are worth the buy alone, just for the clear history presented that these days gets washed away in the slipstream of screaming on socials) the book gets into headier topics of morality and philosophy that try and pull apart the problem in the many ways we think about it. One memorable section shows the increasing abstraction that climate change plays on our minds from, you know, Jack stealing Jill’s bicycle is wrong, all the way up to “Acting independently, Jack and a large number of unacquainted people set in motion a chain of events that causes a large number of future people who will live in another part of the world from ever having bicycles.” Which is sort of what’s happening. Over 80% of global carbon emissions come from 10 countries. Who is it? That would be … us. Or people who, you know, drive, fly, buy stuff that comes from the other side of the world. Complexities of global economics and neverending disagreements on how to measure these things prevent the plastic bouncy ball bought from the dollar store and tossed in the birthday party loot bag from coming anywhere close to being properly priced. So what do we do? Jamieson closes with seven priorities: “integrate adaptation with development” (tie together the math on climate change with our goals on reducing poverty), “protect, encourage, and increase terrestrial carbon sinks” (stop cutting down rainforests and plant new ones), “full-cost energy accounting” (bouncy balls at dollar stores costing more than a buck), “raising the price of emitting greenhouse gasses” (black billowing smoke into the sky isn’t free), “force technology adoption” (like ditching coal-burning plants in favor of newer tech), and then making “substantial increases in research”, and, finally, to “plan for the Anthropocene.” We’re there, he’s saying, so let’s work on that. This is the kind of book most people will run away from. Or think the understandable “I’m just one person and I can’t possibly change things.” But we can take small acts: biking instead of driving, avoiding disposable junk, carbon offsetting flights. And, you know, at minimum, for the future of our species, being informed about what’s happened, what’s happening, and what we can help happen. Jamieson spent 25 years on this book – “I began writing when I turned 40 and handed in the manuscript when I turned 65” – and the detail, of thoughts, ideas, and research shows. It’s not an easy read. I alternated chapters on audio. (David Sedaris gave us that tip for ‘hard books’ back in Chapter 18.) But it’s a necessary read. Sure, I feel depressed, but in a much stronger, much more aware place, to at least understand what’s happening, why it happened, and then guide myself, and ideally my politicians, to keep the pressure on making change and, finally, ultimately, adapting. Highly recommended.
7. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) by J. K. Rowling. Like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6) (8/2023), I read this right when it came out. Like ten minutes after it came out. I waited in line at Chapters Rideau in Ottawa, Canada for midnight copies and was lying in bed at age 31till the wee hours excitedly thinking “I am one of the first people in the world to be here right now!” That was2007. But my 17-years-later self kind of withered from the few hundred extra pages of aimless Horcrux hunting in this final installment. The deep, long, somewhat pointless sidebar into Dumbledore’s sister and mom. I don’t mean to be snide. I love Harry Potter! And, I should say, that’s not all that happens. There is also the senseless murder of a major character every 50 pages. Yes, we do get the epic 100-page fight scene of Harry and Lord V circling each other in the Hogwarts atrium dispensing plot reveals (“You touched the elder wand last!”, “No, you touched the elder wand last!”). And I will always love the book for what it is, what it was to me, what it will be to my kids I’m sure: A gateway drug to reading. A ticket to the world of “books as rock stars”. I mean, J. K. Rowling did a reading of Harry Potter in the Skydome. 20,264 people (seriously) listening to an author? That’s great! That’s gold. But ultimately, I’m just sort of torn up about the revisiting. No reader steps through the same river twice, I suppose. I did enjoy watching characters like Neville in their slow-building arc and, you know, I cried half a dozen times on the pillow next to my son. You know the scenes. But I have mixed emotions. Partly surfacing, maybe, from also just watching the first Harry Potter movie. Did we ever really feel sparks between Ron and Hermione? Did we really need that ‘19 Years Later’ chapter at the end? Ultimately, Book 7 wasn’t as good as Book 6, which wasn’t as good as Book 5, which wasn’t as good as Book 4, which wasn’t as good as Book 3. OK, it was better than the first couple. I’ll give it that. Azkaban, baby! Tentpole of the series! Thanks for the trip, J. K. It was a helluva ride and I’m sure I’ll be back with my next kid.
8. Begin Again: How We Got Here, and Where We Might Go – Our Human Story. So Far. by Oliver Jeffers. This isn’t a children’s book but a long visual essay that stirs a Sapiens-like species history into a disaffected artist’s worldview with a spirited hopefulness for the future. What’s Jeffers's recipe for our post-“cogs in the machine”, Total Entertainment Forever-type present? He says we get there “By slowing down. By creating better stories. Bigger ones where we all fit inside the same powerful plot. In which we think beyond our own lifetimes.” I’m not sure what children Harper Collins Children’s Books had in mind here with this massive, thick, thirty-dollar hardcover. Feels more geared to high school art students. It’s stunning to look at – evocative neon pinks and splashy purple watercolors with cavemen walking out of oceans and inventing rocket ships. But, ultimately, a one-and-done read that’s heavy on moralizing without adding much to the conversation. I’d skip this for Oliver’s earlier books like ‘How to Catch a Star’, ‘Lost and Found’, and ‘The Way Back Home’ and even, in this newer, more zooming-up-and-out political spirit, his 2017 “Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth.”
