Also, I was standing in a parking lot in the Bronx a couple weeks ago when Latanya and Jerry of the amazing Bronx Bound Books Bus started telling me about Libro.FM. I fell in love with it! And used it to listen to half of the new David Sedaris this month. Basically: It's an audiobook company where profits go to the local indie bookstore of your choice and where you own your audio files completely. Why switch from Audible? They made a whole page to explain. I get nothing for telling you about them -- just loved it and wanted to share.
Last thing: If you'd like a daily one line awesome thing through the summer (no ads ever), just sign up here. I began writing the pandemic edition of 1000 Awesome Things in April, 2020 and we have 196 days left. (I'll also be making a big book announcement on that list after the summer.)
Okay! Let's get to the books,
Neil
1. Beyond the Gender Binaryby Alok Vaid-Menon. (L/I/A) Alok ("A-loke") Vaid-Menon was born in College Station, Texas in 1991 to parents from India and Malaysia. When they were young they’d dress up in their mom and sister’s clothes and dance around the living room to Bollywood hits for all their extended family, including their Auntie Urvashi (a gender non-confirming lesbian of color and national activist). The entire room would clap and cheer them on over syrupy bowls of gulab jamon. But when they performed a similar routine onstage at the school talent show at age six ... they got laughed at by the entire school. Thus began a shame-filled odyssey of pretending to live as a boy -- or, at least, male-presenting -- for many years. And it also began an astounding conversation about gender which they're helping to lead globally today. This book firms Alok's place as a dynamic, powerful, and clairvoyant voice. I folded the corners of at least 20 of this slim 58-page book and found myself underlining quote after quote. (Here are some popular quotes from the book.) I grew up the son of Indian immigrant parents in Canada with male and female binaries and the accompanying blue and pink clothes in blue and pink nurseries. Gender divides only deepened with age and, looking back, I know they caused me to self-censor sides of myself. Painting my toenails to hide them in my socks, buying The Babysitter Club books “for my sister”, and quitting figure skating once I became the only boy at the rink. This book helped me remember, see, and accept a bit more of myself. And who is Alok? They created the global #DeGenderFashion movement, headlined the 2021 New York Comedy Festival, graduated at the top of their class twice at Stanford, and have lectured and performed in over 40 countries around the world. This is a complete riptide of an essay. Highly recommended.
2. Happy-Go-Luckyby David Sedaris. (L/I/A) It kills me to say this but I … didn’t like this book. Ugh. That sentence feels wrong – shocking almost. I was sure (positive!) I would love this book. I loved Calypso, his last one, and ranked that just below NakedandMe Talk Pretty One Day on the lofty Sedaris medals podium. I’ve loved nearly everything David has written for decades. Twenty-two years ago I took a three-hour train ride from Kingston, Ontario to the big city of Toronto to have dinner with Jay Pinkerton. Jay was the former editor of the school comedy paper I was about to help run and I was looking for advice. He gave me lots and when I left handed me a copy of Naked by David Sedaris and said “Read this.” An opening essay, “A Plague of Tics”, about his growing obsessive compulsive disorder was captivating. I went back and discovered essays about working as an Elf at Macy’s, living in a dorm at Kent State University for disabled students, and hitchhiking across the country. They were like nothing I’d read before and it was a huge thrill four years ago to hang out with him and get an up-close masterclass in writing. Flash forward to today and David’s essays cover topics around how he and his sister Amy both bought apartments above theirs in Manhattan during the pandemic and his snap purchase of a $3000 jacket that didn’t fit him. I don’t judge him for these things. The honesty is refreshing. (How many rich people pretend they’re not?) But they seem more out of place than usual, wrapped in a sharper anger, a vitriol, and a not-quite-but-almost disorienting strangeness. His wit remains sharp and cutting, and there are certainly gems like his cataloguing of walking barren New York streets at the start of Covid. But: something’s off. David says near the end of the book these essays didn’t get the gift of getting fine-tuned by audiences as his endless touring came to a halt during the pandemic. “It’s not just the applause I’m listening for but the quality of the silence.” Maybe that’s it. He’s still deliciously anti-PC and his incredibly attuned eye remains well-braided with the beautiful-ugly side of self-examination. Halfway through the book I switched to listening to it on Libro.FM and that gave it new energy and life. I still really love David and am sure (positive!) I will love his next one.
3. Lotby Bryan Washington. (L/I/A) I got an email the other day from Casey which read: “Way back in college (11ish years ago) you were on the Today Show and I had the chance to cross paths with you! 1000 Awesome Things was one of my favorite blogs in college. I was navigating coming out and it helped me prioritize my mental health and realize how much joy there was in the world.” (Here’s a picture of us!) Casey and I kept in touch and he wrote back to my May Book Club with a long list of suggested queer literature. I bought the first one on the list – this one! – and read it this month. Wow. What a stunner. A debut collection of short stories all tangentially telling tales of down-and-out Houston through (mostly) the lens of a half-latino-half-black teen working at his family restaurant and navigating distant siblings and a disappearing dad all while coming to grips with being gay. Crackling popping prose that reminded me of Junot Diaz. The accessibility and zing here makes this a great book to study the art of writing. Came out in 2019 and won a slate of fancy awards plus made Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. Highly recommended.
4.Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanationby Natalie Henrich and Joseph Henrich. (L/I/A) Maybe a year ago I read chunks from The WEIRDest People On Earth: How The West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Stuffed to the gills with fascinating charts, ideas, and theories, I traced back the author’s other stuff and came upon this one which I thought might help illuminate some of the bigger issues around our dive-bombing trust levels. It’s a decent book but unfortunately only the first couple chapters offer much. The definition of cooperation feels off (“Cooperation occurs when an individual incurs a cost to provide a benefit for another person or people”) and then most of the book is actually a deep academic field study about an insular group of middle-class Iraqi Christians (called Chaldeans), living in metro Detroit, exploring their kinship relations, ethnicity, and traditions and trying to use that as a barometer for cooperation through generations.
5.The Big Bath Houseby Kyo Maclear. (L/I/A) Kyo is a magical (and magically underrated!) author. We love her The Good Little Book so much at our house and Birds Art Life is one of the most delicate and whimsical memoirs I’ve ever read. (Made my Best of 2019!) I am starting to fall into her orbit. This is Kyo’s newest work – a children’s book recounting her early childhood memories of visiting her grandmother in Japan and visiting bath houses. The book offers a rare acceptance and comfort with all body types, a vision of a world with less strictures and more acceptance between us, and, as my kids will joyfully tell you, a whooooooole lot of full-frontal. Publisher says for age 4-8 and offers this one-liner summary: “A joyful celebration of Japanese cultural traditions and body positivity as a young girl visits a bath house with her grandmother and aunties.” MatthewP on Amazon gives it 1-star and says “Great, lets normalize naked adults bathing with children. This is a dangerous book!” But others in our build-your-own-echo-chamber world call it a “Best Book of the Year” (like the New York Public Library, NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, and The American Library Association.) My kids loved it, Leslie and I loved it, and we didn’t feel it was dangerous in any way. Sure, the vision it depicts feels a long ways off but books are magical and being a dreamer is great fun. Kudos to Kyo for helping us find something we maybe didn’t know we lost. Pairs well with the wonderful Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder.
6. All About Loveby bell hooks. (L/I/A) We are in our fifth year of our epic 1000 formative book countdown and it’s fun to see patterns emerging. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, and (you guessed it) All About Love by bell hooks are some of the most frequently chosen books on our list. (Recipients of the rare double asterisk!) bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, was an author and social activist with a flair for the pen. She wrote over 40 (!) books and this is her most popular. It stretches and peels open the word ‘love’ to reveal an active verb that most of us are likely practicing without much of a manual. Well, here it is! “How do we operationalize love because professing it is so easy and so cheap?”, Brené Brown asked us last year. Each chapter of this book is so deep, so rich, so sumptuous that, for me at least, it had to be read very slowly and sporadically. Want a few choice quotes to see if it resonates? “Our national spiritual hunger springs from a keen awareness of the emotional lack in our lives. It is a response to lovelessness.”, “To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”, and “The most precious gift true love offers is the experience of knowing we always belong.”
7. Raising Your Spirited Childby Mary Sheedy Kurcinka. (L/I/A) And now it’s time for this month's Leslie’s Pick, a book personally chosen and loved by my lovely wife. Enter Leslie: “Do you feel particularly challenged parenting your child and wonder if there might be something ‘wrong’ with you, or ‘different’ about them? Something that makes parenting harder for you than for other people? Do you have a child with lots of energy, an insatiable desire for attention, intense emotions, a louder voice, a more keen sensitivity? If so, you must pick up this book. It’s literally ‘a guide for parents whose child is more intense, sensitive, perceptive, persistent, and energetic’ and it gets right to the point, makes you feel less alone, and helps you accept your spirited child just as they are, and celebrate the characteristics in them that both makes parenting them challenging and ultimately very rewarding.”
8. The Writer’s Libraryby Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager. (L/I/A) Nancy Pearl is a Superhero Librarian. (I mean, she’s actually been turned into a superhero.) She is wise and witty and well-read because, as she says, “I have chosen in this life not to do anything, basically, except read.” It comes as no surprise to me that she and Jeff Schwager took on a project very similar to 3 Books -- figuring out which books influenced some of the greats. We have only one overlap so far -- Dave Eggers! -- and this book features wonderfully long interviews with authors like Donna Tartt, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Andrew Sean Greer, etc. (Here's my interview with Nancy.)
9.Abel’s Islandby William Steig. (L/I/A) A seemingly simple tale of a posh, urbane city mouse named Abelard navigating a lonely island after getting washed away in a rainstorm. William Steig, where have you been all my life? I had vaguely heard his name years ago as the author of the picture book Shrek but that’s about it. I learned Steig lived from 1907 to 2003 and didn’t start writing these wonderful children’s books until his early 60s. He wrote Shrek in his 80s! Someone gave us a little board book of Pete’s A Pizza a while back which is beautiful -- a father rolling his son into a pizza to cheer him up on a rainy afternoon -- and has long remained in our weekly rotation. Now I've read and really loved this layered and nuanced story told with accessible literary precision and offering a quiet contemplation on inner strength. If you (or someone you know) liked Hatchet, this is a great one.
