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Hey everyone,
How are you holding up between screeching halts and face-rippling accelerations? Has your work and life merged into one low-grade buzz at this point? Getting oriented in a disorienting world is tough. Books can help. Snap the addictive wafer in your pocket, kick the TV downstairs like a Slinky, and dive into a good book.
Below are my recommendations this month.
Hang in there,
Neil
1. Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around Youby Frances Frei and Anne Morriss. I sat in Frances Frei’s office at Harvard Business School fifteen years ago telling her about the person I was in love with. She returned the favor telling me about Anne Morriss. She then pulled a sleeve of Starbucks cups off her bookshelf and handed me one with a quote from Anne that Starbucks deemed worthy of mass printing. It became one of my all-time favorite quotes and I still think about it often. (Photo below). My love didn’t last but Frances’s did. She and Anne now have two sons and are an ambitious, trailblazing force on the world stage in the field of modern, empathetic leadership. Frances has parachuted into Uber, Riot Games, and WeWork to address leadership, gender, and culture issues. She’s given an extremely popular TED Talk on building trust. And out this month is the book I’ve been waiting for since that day in her office years ago. Why? Because it comes with that same insightful, growing pain, stomachy tingly feeling I got sitting in her classroom. There’s a wonderful activist twang here and the book will force you to confront the darker and harder to mould sides of your leadership profile. A wonderful book. (PS. Chapter 2 of the book was published as a recent HBR feature story here.)
2. Their Eyes Were Watching Godby Zora Neale Hurston. Have you seen the current non-fiction New York Times bestseller list? To say it’s a reflection of our time would be an understatement. But fiction has just as much to teach us and that list hasn't really changed. What does it really feel like to live in another conscience? I revisited this incredible book published in 1937 which shares the story of a Black American woman born from a rape and raised by her grandmother. Here’s a flavor from Page 19: “You know, honey, us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes thing come round in queer ways…Ah was born back due in slavery so it wasn’t for me to fulfill my dreams of whut a woman oughta be and to do. Dat’s one of de hold-backs of slavery. But nothing can’t stop you from wishin’. You can’t beat nobody down so low till you can rob ‘em of they will. Ah didn’t want to be used for a work-ox and a brood-sow and Ah didn’t want mah daughter used dat way neither. It sho wasn’t mah will for things to happen lak they did. Ah even hated de way you was born. But, all de same Ah said thank God, Ah got another chance. Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah’d take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway through de wilderness for her.”
3. Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger. According to his daughter’s memoir, J.D. Salinger drank his own urine, spoke in tongues, and forcefully adopted new religions every season. True? Not true? Hard to say. He notoriously vanished from the literary scene in a puff of smoke and reputedly wrote many books that were never published. So what remains are works like The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zoey, and this stunning collection of nine short stories, many of which ran in The New Yorkerbefore The Catcher in the Rye was published. How was the book? Well, three of these stories (this one, this one, and this one) left me staring frozen at my ceiling for fifteen minutes afterwards. I am still thinking about them weeks later. Others didn't catch me at all. But, the ones that did were absolutely gripping, twisting, unbelievable experiences of prying my mind from its wet cave, levitating it up, working it around like pizza dough, then dropping it back in. As David Sedaris says: “A good short story would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized now, and uneasy with the fit.”
4.Rosaby Nikki Giovanni. A wonderful award-winning children’s book aimed at 4-8 year olds sharing the story of Rosa Parks and her role of quiet, determined strength in the Civil Rights movement. It’s hard to tell from the cover above but the images on this book just exude the stress and heat of the moment so well. Illustrator Bryan Collier writes: “When I arrived in Alabama, the first thing I noticed was the heat. That is why my paintings for this book have a yellow, sometimes dark, hue. I wanted the reader to feel in that heat a foreshadowing, an uneasy quiet before the storm.”
5.How Humanity Released a Flood of New Diseases by Ferris Jabr. On coronavirus, it’s so hard to get deeper than the surface skim the news endlessly offers. As Ryan Holiday told us on 3 Books: “MSNBC’s goal is to glue you to a screen and sell you Subarus.” How do you get deeper? Find and treasure trusted voices. (Anyone else falling in love with Nassim Taleb or Ed Yong these days?) Here’s a great deeper looking piece from The New York Times Magazine on the issues around the chain reaction between our global species expansion, loss of global biodiversity, and the resulting havoc.
6. The Duel by Anton Chekov. If you haven’t read much classic Russian literature (ditto) then this isn’t a bad way in. It’s short at 92 pages, available free online at Project Gutenberg, and has a slowly building crescendo that will keep you flipping if you can make it through the opening dizziness. It tells the tale of a lazy Russian aristocrat who’s run off to a seaside town with a married woman and is trying to figure out how to extricate himself from the relationship just as he gets a letter informing him that her husband has died. Chaos ensues.
7. The Body: A Guide For Occupants by Bill Bryson. “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power,” says historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens. I kept thinking about that while reading this top to bottom look at our fleshy homes. (Sidenote: I feel this is the perfect companion book to Sapiens, too. If that's “Where did we come from?” then this is “Wait, what are we?”) The early chapters on “The Brain” and “The Head” alone are worth the price of admission. From the back: “Don’t forget that your genes come from ancestors who most of the time weren’t even human. Some of them were fish. Lots more were tiny and furry and lived in burrows…. We would all be a lot better off if we could just start fresh and give ourselves bodies build for our particular Homo sapiens needs – to walk upright without wrecking our knees and backs, to swallow without heightened risk of choking, to dispense babies as if from a vending machine. But we weren’t built for that. We began our journey through history as unicellular blobs floating about in warm, shallow seas.” And it goes from there. A fascinating trip.
8. Cannabis: The Illegalization of Weed in America by Box Brown. I fell in love with Box Brown when I read his graphic novel Tetrisa couple years back. That was an exquisite origin story of the famous video game that read like a John Le Carré spy novel. (Cheers to Malcolm Gladwell for adding John Le Carré to our Top 1000) This is his newest on the history of cannabis and it reads a bit like a paint-by-numbers story from a super long Wikipedia article. And, like a long Wikipedia article, it’s just not quite deep enough on a few fronts. I kept wanting to know more about cannabis from a social, psychological, or cultural perspective, and it doesn’t really get into any of that. If you’re interested in the general history of cannabis then this is a great primer and some fun bits of trivia. But, if you’re looking for immersive graphic novel to get lost in, I’d recommend Tetris or the absolutely exquisite (yes I’m going to recommend it a third time) Berlinby Jason Lutes.
9. Gileadby Marilynne Robinson. “First you find purpose, then you find style, then you find beauty,” Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays with Morrie, told me that high in the Fisher Building in downtown Detroit before scrambling late into the recording studio for his Mitch Album Show. I flew down for a quickie twenty minute interview of 3 Booksand that phrase formed the spinal column of his picks. “First you find purpose” was The Royal Road to Romance which lead him off the beaten path. “Then you find style” was The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe which married his musicality and writing. “Then you find beauty” was this gem which he holds as a beacon towards where he's heading today. There’s a reason Gilead is one of Barack Obama’s favorite books. Set in a small Iowa town named (yes) Gilead in the 1950s it’s a letter from a septuagenarian pastor to his first and only child, a young boy, with everything he wishes he’d be around to tell him when he got older. Sound tearjerking already? Just wait. There are layers beyond layers here and yet they’re all baked into a pastry that somehow feels light as a feather. I already feel like I need to read it again. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and Pleasantly Featured in Neil's June 2020 Book Club.
10. Birds of Ontario by Andy Bezener. Birding has suddenly gone from fringe hobby to cliché. Do you have the Merlin App on your phone? Are you registered on eBird? What warblers have you spotted during the spring migration? You need a good bird book for the backyard. Birds of Ontario isn’t exactly a global resource but you gotta bird where you gotta bird right now. We like using the technique from my wife's grandmother: Keep a good pen in the book at all times (Pilot V5 Hi-Tecpoint Rollerballs, if possible) and write down the date and location of the bird you saw right beside the picture. Turn that bird book into a weathered bird journal that adds character to your shelves.
