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Hey everyone,
Happy end of July!
Toronto public schools ended right on the buzzer of Friday, June 30th so Leslie, me, and our kids started the month feeling a bit fried.
We leaned deep into family time and I ditched my phone for a few weeks. I find handing Leslie my phone and asking her to hide it pretty anxiety-provoking ... but it eventually blossoms into liberating. I find it helpful to tell myself: “You're not as important as you think.” (Maybe we all need to force vacation a bit more?)
Felt grateful for lots of time this month swimming, hiking, birding, and, of course, reading. I kept a giant canvas bag of books with me wherever we went and decided to just pull out and read whatever I felt, whenever I felt. I read maybe an hour a day – before bed, mostly – and enjoyed this “follow the energy” approach. Did I finish every book? No! But finishing is overrated. (And one of our values!) Beware clogger books and do what you need to do to keep turning the page.
Over on 3 Books, I’m experimenting with a new format called Pages. Since a lot of our 125 (!) Chapters clock in at 2-3 hours, I’ve created Pages to be little wisdom snippets under 333 seconds each. The show remains 100% ad-free with no sponsors, promotions, commercials, or interruptions of any kind. Come join us on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
Also, finally got all Book Club Back Issues posted on Neil.blog. Of course, every issue is delivered warm and freshly pressed to inboxes first. If you know someone who likes reading, they can join us right here.
Now let’s hit the books!
Neil
1. Fire Weather: The Making of A Beastby John Vaillant. Did you see the photos of New York City masked in smoke from fires burning thousands of miles away? Who else’s kids were asking if today’s air quality index means recess is getting cancelled again? The scene reminds me of that post-apocalyptic Sigur Rós music video (track 1 from ( )). Right now in Canada, there are over 900 wildfires raging with more land burning by July this year than any other full year since they’ve been tracking in the early 80s. It’s time to get up, up, up, and over this story to see a much fuller picture than headlines provide and this is the book to help us understand what’s happening and why. John Vaillant takes the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire – which led to the largest mass evacuation in North American history and incinerated thousands of homes down to piles of nails – and uses that disaster as a crowbar to pry open an astonishing treasure chest containing our bigger relationship to … fire. Pure and simple. Fire! What it actually is, how it actually behaves, what our relationship has been – and ties it all into what’s happening now. You might scoff when he asks early in the book if fire is a living thing – but you won’t be laughing as you keep reading. If you’ve read any of Vaillant’s previous non-fiction, like The Golden Spruce or The Tiger, you know he has a stunning ability to write cinematic non-fiction, painting endlessly vertiginous, large-scale, centuries- or millennium-long histories, on everything from energy, industry, climate, and how it all works and doesn’t work today. Highly recommended.
2. The Library Bookby Susan Orlean. I got a reply to last month’s book club (06/2023) from longtime 3 Booker Bo Boswell. Bo said he was browsing r/suggestmeabook when he came across the enticingly-titled thread “What’s your field or study (hobbyist or professional) and what’s a cornerstone beginners book for that topic/field?" The 164-time-upvoted top reply by Caleb_Trask19 says: "Librarian here, Susan Orlean’s Library Book is at first glance a true crime book about tracking the arsonist who set fire and burned down the main library in Los Angeles, but it also gives a comprehensive glimpse into contemporary libraries and their issues, especially updating a view of them if you haven’t been inside one since you were a kid." Bo then added his recommendation – saying "the amount of research and bizarre detail Orlean puts into her work is so engrossing" -- and this all gave me the push to finally crack it open. I am here today to tell you that, yes, The Library Book really is as good as everyone says. It’s some kind of breezy magic trick, too. Reading it really feels like wandering shelves of a library -- falling down tunnels, following curiosity trails. Sure, the book kind of centers on that massive 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Public Library but it flares wildly from there. Every chapter feels exciting because you don’t know which way fiery Orlean will flicker. On Page 61 she writes about the library shipping department: “When I first learned that the library had a shipping department, I didn’t know quite what that meant, because I couldn’t think of anything a library needed to ship.” Right. Fair enough. But then she goes on to explain that thirty-two thousand books are shipped around L.A. five days a week and then poetically slips in “It is as if the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.” There’s a simultaneously inspiring and comic chapter where she shadows the city’s head librarian as he tries to make landscaping decisions on distant, uh, branches. She interviews the family of the (deceased) man accused of the fire and paints a sun-starched portrait of his troubled life. There is an entire chapter on library fires through history (you may weep) and another on eccentric Charles Lummis, a guy who walked 3507 miles to Los Angeles from Cincinnati in 1884 to take over the library in a massive controversy after the previous head librarian was fired for not being a man. She shares the history of the US library system: how it used to be country-clubbish – charging for library cards and appealing to elites -- to fresh challenges it faces today as pillars of progressiveness. (“Libraries?,” scoffs Haley Dunphy in an old episode of Modern Family, “I thought that was a bathroom for homeless people?”) A big, overstuffed jack-in-the-box of a book with multiple threadlines braided beautifully together with Susan’s own story – which’ll likely remind you of yours. (It didfor me.) Guaranteed to deepen your reverence of books, libraries, and reading and increase your love for community, connection, and the way we have all shared and will need to share wisdom through the ages. Through the pages. Highly recommended.
3. Crowby Amy Spurway. I spent an hour in the wonderful independent bookstore Armchair Books high up in Whistler last month and stumbled on this bright yellow novel on display near the front. Is it about birds? I thought so but no! It’s a funny, big-voiced, debut novel from Cape Bretonor Amy Spurway. (With Ducks on 03/2023 I’m suddenly on a Cape Breton roll.) Crow is the spicy, depressive protagonist – a woman in her mid-30s who gets jilted from her engagement in Toronto, discovers she has a terminal illness, and then moves home to live with her mom in rural, you guessed it, Cape Breton. Crow’s voice is loud – crass, vulgar, sarcastic, speedy -- and it’s what kept me going through a seemingly endless parade of tough-to-love characters and a plot that feels a bit bloated. Still, it’s worth reading for the voice and its accompanying cozy-home feeling of living in Crow’s impoverished community of eccentrics on an island in the Atlantic Ocean where everybody knows everybody and nobody’s business stays private for long.
4. A Sand County Almanac: With Essays On Conservation From Round Riverby Aldo Leopold. The pandemic pushed us farther indoors and online where we were fed digital pellets that titillated, rewarded, and, ultimately, cajoled. Join Threads! A bastion of free speech! A vibrant global town hall! Sure, uh, the business model is stealing all your data to sell you more stuff. But that’s the price of being connected these days, right? Wrong! Being connected, really connected, is often about unplugging. Stepping outside. Getting into nature. Sparrows, foxes, streams, trees – listening to what they’re saying and connecting, reconnecting, with the vaster worlds around us. Am I tweaked from concurrently reading Fire Weather by John Vaillant? Maybe. But more and more I believe attuning, reattuning, ourselves to the natural world is a critical life skill that’s fast falling away as we step deeper into the matrix. On average, we only spend 7% of our days outside right now – the lowest level ever in recorded history. Do we think there’s no downside to chopping our access to things just because we can’t measure them? Spending a couple of hours a week in nature is associated with better health and well-being. And Dr. Qing Li's research on 'forest bathing' shows deep time in nature lowers blood pressure, lowers stress hormones, lowers anxiety, lowers anger, and improves sleep. Maybe trees just have bad advertising? Nobody boosts Instagram posts that say “Turn this thing off and go for a hike, dummy!” But we should. Good use of tax dollars. Because when we ground and reconnect ourselves to the broader energies of the world we reduce stress while feeling a deeper connection with all living things. If you resonate with this then I have a seventy-five-year-old billboard for you: this collection of passionate and inviting essays by renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold. Aldo died fighting a forest fire in 1948 while also working as a conservation advisor to the United Nations. This after years with the US Forest Service and Wilderness Society. Gone too soon but in his life’s wake he left us this astounding collection of essays on the natural world. The book opens with a 98-page “nature diary” broken into the months of the year that truly make you feel like you’re living on a Wisconsin farm in the 1920s. (Pairs well with Little House In The Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, reviewed 02/2018.) Endless astute and poetic observations of the relationship between mice and owls or the mating displays of American Woodcock deepen awareness to the natural world. Reminded me heavily of Thoreau’s diaries (09/2022). From that opening piece, you can jump between essays for the next few hundred pages – mostly republished from notable bird or wildlife magazines. This is a good book to read in a hammock with a strip of birch bark as your bookmark for when you fall asleep. Aldo's essays squeeze out bits of wisdom sap, too. On Page 181 he writes “The man who cannot enjoy his leisure is ignorant, though his degrees exhaust the alphabet, and the man who does enjoy his leisure is to some extent educated, though he has never seen the inside of a school.” And on Page 212 he says “Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relation with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.” Thank you, Aldo, for the gift. And thank you, J. Drew Lanham, for pointing me to it.
5. As I Lay Dyingby William Faulkner. For a 93-year-old book, this book sure has a modern structure: Fifteen different characters offering short, first-person viewpoints of the dramatic couple weeks during which family matriarch Addie Bundren dies and then has her body carried by her husband and children over Mississippi backcountry to be buried. I loved the voices – a potentially problematic poorboy pidgin – but couldn’t figure out what was going on. So I decided to take the advice Ryan Holiday gave us back in Chapter 38 and just unapologetically take a time-out to read the full Plot Summary on Wikipedia before diving back in. No book guilt, no book shame. Did I love it? No, not really. I felt a bit like I might be watching Citizen Kane without realizing how many things it did differently because they don’t seem that different anymore. I like that it was crazy modernist for the 1930s but if you want fresher modernism I might suggest If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler by Italo Colvino, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, or Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders. (What would you add to that list? Just reply and let me know…)
6. That Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means: The 150 Most Commonly Misused Words And Their Tangled Historiesby Ross Petras and Kathryn Petras. It’s been a while since we’ve added a book to our Enlightened Bathroom Reading series. This one makes the porcelain mantle. Lemme ask: Do you know the difference between imply and infer? Barter and haggle? Podium and lectern? Don’t worry! Neither does The New York Times, The Washington Post, or Barack Obama! Each of these 150 little (bathroom-sized) essays opens with a headline or speech excerpt by someone using the word wrong before a slightly-acidic-but-ultimately-empathetic explanation of the difference. So, for example, they’ve got a sliver of Obama’s eulogy for Senator Ted Kennedy where he says “We can still hear his voice bellowing through the Senate chamber, face reddened, fist pounding the podium…” and then chime in to say that, actually, “a podium is a raised platform where a speaker stands to deliver a speech, so Obama’s vivid image of a red-faced Ted Kennedy in a Senate speech pounding the podium makes for a surprisingly gymnastic congressional session.” Meanwhile, a lectern is the “raised, slanted stand where a speaker places notes for a speech.” Some writeups will illuminate, some you could write yourself, and others may trigger that “Oh, yeah, right, of course, of course" reflex. Petras and Petras (a high-flying brother-sister publishing business, I learned) do a good job of weaving everything together and they helpfully close each essay with the bolded dictionary definition – if you need to skim because your sister is banging on the door to use the shower, etc. Btw: “When you imply, you’re the speaker. When you infer, you’re the listener” and “When you’re bargaining over the price of a rug, you’re haggling… whereas bartering is trading, exchanging goods or services without using money.” No need to haggle over the price of this one. Fun vocabulary tuneup.
7. My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop. Poll: Is owning your own bookstore the a) best business in the world? or b) worst business in the world? For fun let’s say you must pick one. No in-betweeners! Okay, hands up if you think that owning your own bookstore is ... the best business in the world. Okay, yeah – some hands, lots of hands. Great, hands down, hands down. Now: hands up if you think owning your own bookstore is ... the worst business in the world? Some hands, now lots of hands. Bit of a tossup. Maybe it is the worst business? Could it be? After all, your inventory turns maybe once a year, you spend evenings and weekends lifting heavy boxes of heavy things, and, you know, whenever you actually sell a book you take home a few dollars which, after rent and staff, leaves you with what? A nickel? Or, wait, that’s way too harsh. Best business in the world people: Could you be right? I hope you’re right. Maybe truly nothing is better than swathing yourself and your community in an invisible, invaluable blanket of collective wisdom from our forever-shared past. You basically live in a room at the furthest possible progressive place of our neverending cultural conversation. And by being right there – picking books, suggesting books, talking about books – you participate and further that conversation. You’re at the intersection of all the things we know so far and all the things we’re learning. What could be more important than that? I voted a) in the poll. Least that’s the headspace I got to after flipping through 80-something luminaries – Ann Patchett, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Dave Eggers – sharing a little essay celebrating their favorite bookstore. Not as good as visiting Fiction Addiction in Greenville, Rainy Day Books in Kansas City, Powell’s in Portland, Munro’s in Victoria, or Books&Books in Coral Gables, but hey – it was the next best thing.
8. The Best Nestby P.D. Eastman. My sister-in-law gave me this book last year with the inscription “Neil! Happy birthday to you … someone who models contentment, loving what you’ve got, and taking good, good care of your nest! To you + the birds!” Beautiful sentiment from a beautiful person, but, just being honest, contentment might be the opposite of what I’ve felt most of my life. (Not sure a content person would spend the past five years writing 3 books, recording 100 podcasts, giving 300 keynote speeches, writing 1000 awesome things...) Contentment is a bit of a north star to me. Somewhere I'm heading even if it’s somewhere I never fully reach. (I was a bit of a robot when Leslie and I met.) So, I appreciate the gift, I’m glad I’m putting out some contentment vibes, and this little inner conversation is all probably why this colorful 1968 picture book by P.D. Eastman (most famous for Go, Dog! Go, one of Douglas Rushkoff's 3 most formative books) hit me hard. Just instead of the “husband bird in blue paperboy cap” being content or the “wife bird in the pink bonnet”, I felt like, you know, both. I’m Mr. Bird who sings on the first page “I love my house. I love my nest. In all the world my nest is best!” and also Mrs. Bird who screams on the next “I’m tired of this old place. I hate it. Let’s look for a new place right now!” Place being a perfect metaphor for everything, of course. In the book what follows is a fairly predictable series of unfortunate looking-for-a-new-home situations before the birds ultimately find each other back at the first nest. Still, it’s the opening two pages that stick with me. “I love my house. I love my nest. In all the world, my nest is best.” Maybe the book leaves us with a trite but helpful gratitude-forcing mantra to sing to ourselves whenever we’re eying the next ... anything. “I love my house. I love my nest. In all the world, my nest is best.”
