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Hey everyone,
I’m excited because after sending you monthly book recommendations for two years it’s finally the first month I get to say “I have a new book!”
How To Get Back Upis out on Audible now and then comes out in print next year. I tried giving it an objective review in the list of book recos below.
As always, happy reading,
Neil
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1. How To Get Back Up: A Memoir of Failure and Resilienceby Neil Pasricha. What happened to the awesome guy? A few years ago Neil was yapping about illegal naps and wrong-colored foods. I could get behind that! Who couldn’t? The books sold like crazy. But just when we were readying ourselves for The Book of Awesome 4, the guy does a bizarre heel turn, throws on a suit, and comes out with The Happiness Equation. A business book originally written as a letter to his unborn son on living a happy life. I missed the awesome things but guess I saw the connection. But … what exactly is this new book? That’s the puzzle. It seems like a cross between memoir and self-help and I’m not quite sure if Pasricha straddles that chasm or falls into it. I’ll say this: If you liked the first few minutes of his TED Talk (his parent’s immigrant story, his divorce, his personal life) then you’ll like this as he goes wider, deeper, and more personal here. It feels like a 3:00am driveway conversation with an old friend. But the real surprise is all the research and models folded into these stories. Contracts! Small ponds! Batching! Untouchable Days! Sometimes I feel like that dude just needs to chill. Newsflash! You don’t need a robotic system to maximize every waking minute! Not every failure results in a shiny gold nugget of wisdom! But then, other times, I feel like he gets how short life is and the game he’s really playing is just helping us all make them count.
2. Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Onesby James Clear. I was listening to the episode of The Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard Podcast with Seth Meyers when he said, and excuse my French, but “I have such a boner for hard workers.” It hit a nerve with me. Chapter 2 of The Happiness Equationis all about valuing intrinsic motivators over extrinsic ones, valuing inputs over outputs. Well, hard work is the ultimate input. And James Clear has been working hard for years. He writes these epic articles on his blog, publishes them for free, and has created an entire community around them. Atomic Habits feels like the grand culmination of those years of hard work. No surprise it instantly debuted on the New York Times bestseller list last week. I always say “Systems beat goals” and if you’re looking to inject your life with some new systems to help get things done… this is a great place to start.
3. Cherry A Novel by Nico Walker. This novel is a bat out of hell. Nico Walker is a US veteran who did a stint in Iraq, came back with PTSD, developed a heroin habit, and is currently in jail serving an 11-year term for robbing banks. He wrote the novel Cherry in prison. He’s still in prison now. What’s the novel about? Oh, you know, an unnamed narrator, who goes to war as a teen, returns traumatized, becomes addicted to heroin, and starts robbing banks. Nico Walker says he is using royalties from this instant bestseller (with movie rights purchased for a million dollars) to pay back the banks he robbed. It is harrowing, captivating, and gripping. But, fair warning: This book really feels like you’re in the brain of a traumatized vet who develops a drug addiction. You go through the traumas with him. All the newspaper headlines and scientific proclamations are stripped away. It’s not a “what's happening” story as much as a “how it happens.” Some reviews call this book the first real tale from the front lines of the opioid epidemic. It’s a scary place. But you probably won’t be able to put it down.
4. Gladiator: A Podcast by The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team. “I saw it twice … in theaters.” Ever use that phrase? It means you were so obsessed with a movie you saw it twice! In theaters! You paid like thirty bucks to see it. I do that maybe once a year. Spotlight was my “I saw it twice in theaters” movie a few years ago. I loved it so much I took notice when the Boston Globe’s investigative journalism Spotlight team just dropped a new podcast called Gladiator. Also, I love NFL football. And the podcast is all about Aaron Hernandez, the New England Patriot’s tight end who was convicted of murder and took his own life in jail. There are a lot of bigger questions swirling in the pond of this great show. Highly recommended.
5.Fortunately, The Milk by Neil Gaiman. Judy Blume suffers no fools. I found this out the hard way when I flew down to her Key West bookstore to interview her for 3 Books. I told her I was starting to read my young son middle-grade books and I’m exaggerating a bit but she said something along the lines of “Oh, you’re robbing him of his childhood!” I'm not going to lie. I felt bad. But maybe she’s right. She is Judy Blume! But I can’t help it. I love reading books with my son. Any books! Thrilling books. Thrilling and scary aren’t the same. To me the ageist notion that books should be cordoned off to “2-5 year olds” or “4-8 year olds” is tired. Let’s all just read what we want. And what I want to read, on my own, then with my son, is this wonderfully fantastical tale of why a father was late bringing milk home for his kids at breakfast. He takes them on an engrossing, time-travelling plot, with plenty of aliens, swashbuckling pirates, and time-travelling dinosaurs to keep it hopping. A wonderful book.
6. Paris Spleenby Charles Boudelaire. What’s your relationship with poetry? Are you an abstainer? Never tried! Never will! Are you a dabbler? I like me a good long classic poem (like, say, this or this). Or are you an aficionado? Now, I was an abstainer for a long time. Poetry? No. No thanks. Not for me. But I’ve slowly grown into a dabbler. And this is a great book to dabble in because the poems go somewhere. They aren’t too, you know, too artsy fartsy. Poems in The New Yorker, I’m not going to lie, are way over my head. These are almost mini little stories sometimes. Here is one of my favorites from the book – it’s called Get Drunk.
7. Where’d You Go, Bernadette? A Novel by Maria Semple. Maria Semple is a former writer for Arrested Development, Ellen, and Mad About You and she’s put together an incredible novel in a unique way – as the form of Bernadette’s 15-year-old daughter solving the riddle of her mother’s disappearance by collecting newspaper clippings, stolen emails, and schools newsletters. All of which are laid out in chronological order. The comedy acrobatics are incredible as every plot twist and turn is in service of a perfectly solved Rubik’s Cube by the end. A real masterwork and definitely the funniest novel I’ve read all year.
