Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - April 2025

Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Hey everyone,

Thank you for being part of the resistance!

A loyal band of people flipping pages in the age of infinite scrolls!

Last issue I shared some of your letters in the opening. It was popular so I'm doing it again! Scroll down to the picture if you want to skip to the reviews.

In response to my last ​Book Club​ (​03/2025​) Beth A. wrote:

I use this newsletter as a form of entertainment, as a form of finding books to add to my to-read list, and as a way to hear from someone else with a slightly different point of view. I'm challenged to read outside my genre and comfort. It makes me a better reader and a better person. I also appreciate Leslie's additions for the same reason.

Thanks Beth! Leslie is back this month with a book she’s been raving about. I love hearing about different reading habits so much. Mary S. shared hers:

I do not have time for much fiction. I am much more interested in learning about relevant world problems and subjects like longevity and brain trauma research. Right now I am reading ‘​The Ageless Brain​’ by Dale Bredesen.

Looks great. Adding to my TBR! Thanks Mary. And then Bo B. wrote saying:

I also recently read Sahil's ‘​5 Types of Wealth​,’ and I can totally relate to your review. The book is quite an accomplishment, how he brought together some of the most popular studies, practices, and principles. The bibliography section alone is probably worth the price of the book. I can see it showing up in lists like “Most Practical Books for Graduates” or something. But did I like the book? Would I recommend it to a friend? That's tougher for me to answer. I found it mildly exhausting to read for any stretch of time, like doing a mental HIIT workout. Maybe it's too optimized, kinda how a ChatGPT summary of an article seems to lose the charm of the fabric of thought that the author was working with. I highlighted the hell out of the book, but I wouldn't say it was an enjoyable read. In contrast, I also read ‘​The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life​’ by Boyd Varty. It's a fraction of the length. There are virtually no references to any studies. But I found this book to have much more heart, and the message was more impactful. I recommend it!

Thank you, Bo! Always good to hear from you. The book recos we share here are gold. I value this Saturday morning coffee shop chat so much. We help each other grow. I'd like to start ‘opening letters’ as a regular feature! If I feature a snip of your letter (i.e., email-reply) to my book club I'll sign and mail you ​a book​ to say thanks. OK, finally this month let's go to Devra T.:

Must hear more about FFF!! I've been thinking about the comings and goings of friendships, having naturally grown out of one last year and we are building a new one with some of our youngest daughter's friend's parents currently. I haven't read widely on the topic (yet), being a natural extrovert I am quick to ‘make friends.’ But it is true that we expect friendships, like romantic relationships, to be effortless, and if there is effort involved, then it's not worthwhile to continue trying. The same is true of neighbors and neighborhoods. To ponder when looking at the rise in loneliness.

Interesting, Devra. Thank you. Friendships are definitely two-way. My favorite book on friends is ​Robin Dunbar's​ ‘How Many Friends Does One Person Need?’ (​BO2023​).

Fun hearing from you and keep ’em coming. Apologies in advance if I miss your note or don't reply. I try!

Now let's hit the books!

Neil

P.S. I don't advertise. This is word of mouth. Invite others ​here​.

---

1. ​High Five​ by Adam Rubin. Illustrated by Daniel Salmieri. I think this is the most underrated children’s book of the past few years. Came out in 2019 before getting buried in pandemic quicksand. Bookstores closed, browsing closed—boxing-glove-to-jaw punchout for picture books. Yet years later I still find myself turning to it every month or two when I’ve been away and need a fun, long, cuddly half-hour read to fill up. Who else has a good book for staying in their kid's beds—lingering, loitering, lavishly languishing? The book opens with an announcement! Told in just two of its magnificent forty rhyming paragraphs:

For the rest of the book the reader is thrust into participating in the “75th Annual High Five Tournament” and then steps into the ring to physically battle—high five!—a series of contestants ranging from “Gigantic The Bear with 700 pounds of hair” to “Kangaroo Paul with Fastest Hands Of Them All” to “Octopus Jones” who, of course, requires eight high fives to defeat. With a scribbly first-person perspective and boxing-ring-style judges rating your high fives in front of a thunderous crowd in a packed arena, you somehow manage to obliterate the competition. Reads like you’re Little Mac playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!. Who is the scarier final opponent?

I’m adding this to my new list (​Neil.blog​, ​Goodreads​) called “Massively Underrated Picture Books.”

2. ​In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed ​by Carl Honoré. Do you inspect other people’s bookshelves? It’s okay. You can admit it. You’re not judging them—​no book guilt, no book shame!​—but … getting to know them. Paying attention to what they’re paying attention to! (​Anne Bogel ​of ​What Should I Read Next?​ shares this fascination and we discussed it in ​Union Square​). Well, I’m a book shelf inspector too, and thank goodness for that. Otherwise I may never have found this gem more than a decade ago when I visited my then-girlfriend Leslie’s parent’s house and found a couple bookshelves by the ping pong table. I love this book. I’ve read it three times now. If you don’t know Carl Honoré you could start with his hit 2005 TED Talk ​of the same name​. Or, you know, ​just read the transcript​. Why? Because as Carl says: “Everyone wants to know how to slow down but they want to know how to slow down quickly.” Since its 2004 publication this magnum opus has only become more important. On page 9 Carl quotes Milan Kundera’s ‘Slowness’ (​3/2025​) “When things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself.” Milan Kundera, where art thou now? Maybe having coffee in the clouds with ​Neil Postman​, ​Jiddu Krishnamurti​, and ​David Foster Wallace​? Part of the reason I force myself to write these superlong book clubs, and do them by, you know, writing with my own fingers instead of using AI is … to help my own brain slow down. We have to remember: Endless scrolling was invented in 2006, TikTok in 2016, 5-second images of anything you can think of in 2025. We are experiencing a grand quickening. The danger is that Kundera’s prophecy may come true. Step one in steadying yourself in the tidal wave? Read this book. Learn to find your own pace in the machine and find areas in your life you can purposefully shift the gears back down to “human.” One of the most eye-opening sections comes early when from pages 42-44 ​he traces the resistance to the cult of speed over the ages​. There are so many tidbits on slowing down, though—in food, in sex, in … everything. On page 228 he describes how educator Jenny Harley and her reading club consumed ‘​Little Dorrit​’ by Charles Dickens (1812-1870) “in the same way it would have been read in its day—in monthly instalments spread over a year and a half.” I love that! And what does she say afterwards? “When you rattle through it, you don’t appreciate some of the jokes and waiting games, and the play that Dickens makes with secret stories and hidden plots.” Secret stories? Hidden plots? Sounds like detail, mystery, complexity, nuance! Not sure about you but I’m not getting much of that on social media. How about this provocative idea on page 101: “In a recent British show, motorists caught driving too fast in a school zone were given a choice between paying the fine and facing the local children. Those who chose the latter sat ashen-faced at the head of a classroom, fielding poignant questions from kids as young as six: How would you feel if you ran me over? What would you say to my parents if you killed me? The drivers were visibly shaken. One woman wept. All went away vowing never to break the speed limit again.” Crazy idea? Bit unethical as rich people can just buy their way out, maybe? (Should we adopt the ​Finnish community trust-building strategy of charging traffic violations as a percentage of income​?) This book isn’t just preaching a “slow at all costs vibe” though. It’s preaching mastery. (​Preach about mastery, Derek​!) Silencing your inner sea so greatness can bubble up from the deep. He peppers in great quotes from Captain J. A. Hadfield (“This art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of energy in our great men.”) and Albert Einstein (“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.”) Taken together it’s a manifesto—a hold onto your caps and your brains, folks—as we continue plugging ourselves deeper into the matrix. Benefits of meditation, resurgence of tantra sex, how garden views reduce pain—it’s all here. A masterful tour de force.

3. ​Ghost​ by Jason Reynolds. A 180-page, 14-point-font book you will feel, love, learn from, and fly through. My wife was scrolling through ​Indigo’s well-curated lists​ hunting for books for our oldest. He’d just finished the 5-book ‘​The Academy​’ series—about a boy who works towards living his dream playing in the ​Premier League​—and she found … this. Confusing title, maybe. Ghost? But it pulls you in with a loud, punchy, center-channel voice. Ghost is the self-anointed nom-de-plume of Castle Cranshaw, a poor seventh grade kid who accidentally joins a local track team and finds himself addressing his own trauma (on page 5 his dad drunkenly fires a gun at him and his mom as they flee their apartment and gets sentenced to 10 years in prison) and anger (he punches a bully out in the cafeteria a few pages later) on a deep, visceral, emotional level. Jason Reynolds is a magician. And the voice—what a voice. From page 4: “I got to punch that jerk Brandon in the face—I know, I know, not cool, but still!—leave school early, and hang out at the track with my new coach—because I was on a team now—who turned out to be a pretty cool dude. Me and Coach didn’t go no further into my life or nothing like that, which was a good thing because I never really told nobody about my dad.” Perfect storytelling, memorable characters—it'll have you feeling like you can do the 100 meters in under 10 by the end.

4. ​Educated: A Memoir​ by Tara Westover. Years ago I flew to New York for ​Book Expo​ and went to some fancy dinner with my literary agent and a dozen publishing people. I remember like half of them were carrying this book. So I bought it … and put it on my shelf … where it sat for 7 years until the ever-insightful ​Kim Holderness​ told me it’s one of her 3 most formative (along with ‘​Quiet​’ by Susan Cain [​2/2020​] and ‘​Bossypants​’ by Tina Fey) and that she still thinks about every week. Every week? 7 years later? I cracked it open. And the energy that shot out of the pages kept me gripped late into the night for weeks. The book took me far, far away before slingshotting me back to a here and now that felt strange and familiar. We open in the 90s on the side of an Idaho mountain where “cliffs appeared suddenly [and] feral horses, belonging to my grandpa, ran wild over thick banks of water hemlock, and there were more than a few rattlesnakes.” Tara tells her tale in endless tight, gripping stories from her vantage point as the youngest of seven in a large family with an extremist father who works at “scrapping” and doesn’t trust the government or doctors or schools. (“I may as well surrender my kids to the devil himself as send them down the road to that school.”) No one goes to school. They wander, work, get hit in the head by metal tossed at them by their dad, fall off skids high in the air on unstable forklifts their dad is steering and crack their heads on concrete, get into car accidents in the middle of nights in their car full of kids lying everywhere with no seatbelts, and drive with their mom to high-risk pregnancies helping deliver babies for people who would rather die than go to a hospital. This book isn’t as good as everyone says—it’s better. Slap to the face, splash to the face. And it’s two books, really. The first half you’re living a wild, thrilling, confusing, loving, frenzied upbringing of self-discovery and the second you’re with Tara as she goes to BYU then Cambridge then Harvard then Cambridge again. Together they make a sour-sweet-sour read that is a wondrous eyes-open summary of the supremely talented Tara Westover’s first 34 years. A take-your-breath-away book.

5. ​The Days Are Just Packed: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection​ by Bill Watterson (b. 1958). Last week I saw ​Ryan Holiday​ ask people on Twitter, “What’s your favorite book to re-read?” so I threw in my response:

Replying made me realize I ... hadn’t actually picked up a Calvin and Hobbes in a while. Over a year? For sure I read the first and last ones when ​Daniels​ (​Everything Everywhere All At Once​) picked them as formative. But it's been too long! The strip is one of the world’s most exquisite artistic feats. For ten straight years from 1985 to 1995 Bill Watterson (then aged 27 to 37) published a brand new Calvin and Hobbes strip … every day. Every day! And this collection in particular is his first “widescreen” book where Watterson, who was being published in over 2000 major newspapers at the time, unleashed his full powers and unshackled himself from the constrained universe of small-box funnies. Like on page 7 and 10 of the book the first two Sunday strips still have that awkward-but-mandatory “2-panel punchline” because some papers ran with the header and some ran without:

But Watterson then started putting out his newfangled “take it or leave it” big Sunday rectangles which trashed convention and introduced dynamic new ways to tell stories. (I love the opening line in the first-ever Sunday box-busting strip with Calvin transgressively saying: “If you ask me, Hobbes, the whole notion of ‘instant gratification’ is a myth!”) By the end of this book he's doing acrobatic leaps, bounds—into the clouds, into the stratosphere—beyond the reach of every other cartoonist of the time and (maybe) since:

Watterson never commercialized Calvin. No ads, no sponsors, no commercials, no interruptions. I love it. I admire it. I respect it. There are no Hobbes stuffies, no Miss Wormwood dartboards, no horrible "Calviner and Hobbes" Netflix version with too-high-pitched-and-too-low-pitched voices. So the comic books remain highly, highly potent. Plus, over the years, they've become increasingly prophetic. Much of what maligned Watterson through his 20s and 30s feels like it’s been blooming like a grey cloud. No wonder after his sudden and surprising retirement he has seemingly spent his 40s, 50s, and now 60s with his family—painting pictures he doesn’t share or post, declining every interview request, and steering well clear of any kind of public or online existence. His strips serve as brain jostles. Pokes in the dark. They haven't aged a bit! Like where Calvin is wearing pyjamas standing in front of his TV holding a bowl in the first panel saying “Oh greatest of the mass media, thank you for elevating emotion, reducing thought, and stifling imagination” before continuing in the second “Thank you for the artificiality of quick solutions and for the insidious manipulation of human desires for commercial purposes” before bowing down with the bowl in front of him in the third panel saying “This bowl of lukewarm tapioca represents my brain. I offer it in humble sacrifice. Bestow thy flickering light forever.” A final panel shows his mom in her nightie with bleary eyes staring at the flashing TV in the middle of the night. Um, indeed. Ever-illuminating. Ever-wondrous. Worth being read again ... and again ... and again. (P.S. If you haven’t read it I recommend Bill's ​1990 Commencement speech​ to Kenyon College—to my knowledge the only public speech he's ever done.)

6. ​Raising Calm Kids in a World of Worry: Tools to Ease Anxiety and Overwhelm​ by Ashley Graber and Maria Evans. And now it’s time for a “Leslie’s Pick” where we feature a book recently read and loved by my beautiful wife, Leslie. Over to her! “There’s a real buzz of anxiety and worry in the world right now. With AI, political headlines, and climate doom, parents have a lot to stress over—both in our everyday reality and in our long term guiding of our children. We all know there’s no such thing as ‘perfect parenting’ and Graber and Evans's writing is warm and accessible as they share concrete strategies to develop psychological safety for children using an acronym called SAFER (Set the tone, Allow feelings to guide behaviours, Form identity, Engage like a pro, Role model). They also outline for parents how to understand our child’s worry and place it in context of what’s developmentally normal as well as when to get extra help. Full of relatable stories about real life current day families and unlike many parenting books that just make me feel like there’s more to do, this is a calming, comforting support on the honourable, challenging, and ever-rewarding journey of parenting in today’s demanding times!”

7. “​The World Porn Made​” by Sophie Gilbert. Not a book! But a long 10-page feature article that will stop you in your tracks. I was walking through the Orlando airport last week after missing my flight when I picked up the current issue of The Atlantic. A few flips in came this astounding feature by Sophie Gilbert who takes a from-outer-space view of pornography’s impact on culture over the past 50 years from VCRs to Trump’s latest retweet. I am 45—just 3 years older than the author—and she completely nails the social zeitgeist I grew up in, too. One that starts at the dawn of the millennium when “Britney Spears appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone lying on a pink bed wearing polka-dot panties and a black push-up bra, clutching a Teletubby doll” in the swirl of Best Picture-winner ​American Beauty​ where “a middle-aged man has florid sexual fantasies about his teenage daughter’s best friend” and the introduction of the Abercrombie & Fitch holiday catalog which featured “nude photo spreads, sly references to oral sex and threesomes, and an interview with porn actress Jenna Jameson, in which she was repeatedly harangued by the interviewer to let him touch her breasts.” What’s the lesson she and her friends pick up? That their power was sexual. Flash forward a couple decades and ​Roe v. Wade​ is overturned and now we have Gilbert, post-pandemic, post-kids, looking back and observing how porn has “changed our culture, and, in doing so, has filtered into our subconscious minds, beyond the reach of rationality and reason.” In 1985 Americans rented 75 million adult videos. In 1995 that number was 750 million. Performers from Madonna to Snoop Dogg to The Weeknd were quick to cash in by starring in pornographic offerings and technology was often reverse engineered based on demands from porn. “Google Images was created after Jennifer Lopez wore a vivid-green jungle-print Versace dress to the 2000 Grammy Awards, cut so spectacularly low that it became the most popular search query Google had seen to date. Facebook was born in 2004, after Mark Zuckerberg first experimented with making a website dedicated to assessing the relative hotness of Harvard undergraduates. And when Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steve Chen founded YouTube in 2005, it was partly because Karim had been searching for videos of Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’ at the Super Bowl and couldn’t easily find one.” She catalogs what we did to people—from underage women in ‘Girls Gone Wild’ tapes to Pamela Anderson’s illegally stolen-from-her-locked-bedroom-safe-and-released honeymoon sex tape to Jennifer Ringley, college nerd and first ‘cam girl’ of Jennicam to VP-candidate Sarah Palin who, after her nomination, had lookalikes hired by Larry Flynt off Craigslist to shoot a pornographic film in 10 days called Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?. It’s scary how the algorithm’s thirst for endless extremes to get eyeballs is what’s driven culture. In 2001 in The Guardian Martin Amis ​wrote about the business of porn​ and said that “The new element is violence.” Perhaps the most horrifying takeaways come today when the author discusses elements of the campaign against Kamala Harris that are honestly too shocking for me to even write here. I struggle with pornography’s deep intertwining relationship in our culture. I’m raising kids. I worry about what they’ll see, when they’ll see it, how to keep them safe—how to keep them sane. For fathers, for mothers, for sisters, for brothers, this is an illuminating light on our culture with the goal, the hopeful goal, of seeing it and observing it, so we may rid ourselves of the mask, and then discuss and engage with it in an open and healthier way. I’ve had a subscription to The Atlantic off and on for decades and just renewed it. They've been independent for 168 years! It started with Thoreau writing about abolitionism! I applaud their dedication to longform journalism, I crave their deep research in an era of the sound bite, and I have loved recent featured articles and short stories from people like ​Jonathan Haidt​, Anne Applebaum, and ​George Saunders​. ​Click here to read this article (via a gift link)​ and ​click here to join me with a subscription​.

8. ​Fifty Ideas For Building Better Cities: The Monocle Companion​. Maybe six or seven years ago my neighbour Jason and I went up and down the street and knocked on doors to collect fifty signatures on a homemade letter which we gave to our city councillor who presented it to Toronto City Council. Six weeks later we had speed bumps installed on our street and our kids only needed to beware of cars going 30 or 40km/hour instead of 60 or 70. I am slightly embarrassed that this was probably my first form of civic activism. I liked it! Since then I’ve helped get traffic lights installed, repaired dangerous sidewalks, and helped ​beautify corners​. I haven’t done much—praise be to mayors and councillors!—but I’m learning how easy it is to be helpful on a small scale. Sometimes international and national news stories can feel just way above our abilities to do anything. But we can read neighbourhood signs, talk to interesting people we meet (like ​Doug​, ​Soyoung​, or ​Nickisha​), and send in ​protest letters​. What helps? This book! I bought it last year from the Monocle Store on College Street West in downtown Toronto (​one of six Monocle stores​ globally with the others in London, Zürich, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and Tokyo). And I love Monocle’s ethos of graphic design, culture, and travel together with their philosophy of being totally off social media and instead focusing on very human and analog-y outputs of ​print​, ​radio​, ​books​, and ​newsletters​. So what’s in the book? 50 loosely held-together ideas presented in accessibly tart essays which include “#12 Playgrounds for change” (“Residents should be annoyed if a crude graffiti tag appears on a new slide. They need to care if teenagers start littering a playground floor”) to “#19 The sensory city” (“The membrane of touchpoints and details that connect us to urban life on the surface—planting, seating, music, games—are being value-engineered out of existence”) to “#21 A Sky full of plants” (“Gustavo Gandini, a professor of animal genetics at the University of Milan, is tending to a lavender bush on his abundantly green seventh-floor terrace”). Some essays are lyrical like the four-page gem “#25 Why we need city laureates,” some articulate truths you may have felt before like “#31 The pedestrian manifesto,” and others provoke imagination and energy like “#34 Every city needs a fairground.” I like this book because it makes civic activism and political change feel … accessible. We can’t call the President but we can call our locals! We can protest! We can. We should. Sometimes, honestly, if you’re inclined to help then the old adage to “Think Global and Act Local” still applies. Whether it’s picking up trash at the park, joining a local group asking for change, or just collecting signatures for a set of speed bumps or a traffic light, this book offers a set of spurs and inspiration to help.

9. Nine! There is no nine. Just a little diary entry and some links. I've been in Airplane Mode lately. Suddenly everyone's having a conference! San Diego, Nashville, Dallas, Houston, Wichita, and Orlando ... in two weeks. In Orlando I spoke to 1500 911 (and ​999​!) operators about research-backed ways to take care of our mental health so we can show up for others. I shared ​many​ ​things​ ​you’ve​ ​heard​ ​me​ ​talk​ ​about​ before including, of course, reading ​2 pages of fiction​ before bed. (​46% of us read 0 books in the past year​.) I wrote down ‘​19 Things I Would Tell Myself At Age 19​’ and slipped in a fun walk with ​Nickisha the Dog Walker​—who walks 100km a week! I enjoyed ​this new conversation​ between Jonathan Haidt and Ezra Klein on the status of the phone-free childhood. Btw, Jon’s book, ‘​The Anxious Generation,​’ just hit a year straight on the New York Times bestseller list since it came out. My review is ​here​ and my favorite pages ​here​ and ​here​. As AI quickly soaks into everything at its endlessly dizzying pace I found some comfort in the ideas in Mat Balez's wonderful essay “​Parenting for superintelligence​.” The woodpeckers are ​fighting back​. Karen W. let me know that Little Free Library just opened its ​200,000th book box​! Are you ​high agency or low agency​? You've heard of ​slow productivity​; now it's time for ​slow travel​. ​Great article ​on developing a deep reading habit. Eric Jorgenson asks “​What guest will you listen to on ANY podcast?​” Gladwell ​twitter-punches​. Dan Go reminds us ​health doesn't have to be hard​. NNT gets ​corrected by Community Notes​. What TikTok execs ​say about TikTok​. I thought Mark Carney was ​thanking me​ for a second! (Though I agree with the other Neil.) And may we always remember: We can't do it alone. Thank you for reading to the end. Thank you for being here. ​It really does take a village.​