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Hey everyone,
Summer, summer, where did she go?
It's been a blistering hot one up here in Toronto with smoky air billowing about. I have found myself thinking of 'Fire Weather' by John Vaillant (07/2023) and feeling simultaneously scorched by the heat with the occasional relief of jumping into a cold lake.
I was in 22 cities before the summer and next month I'm speaking and podcasting in Bucharest, Amsterdam, and Nairobi so our family system has the summers like lungs that power the rest. That and Leslie being a saint, of course. Really more of a celestial being who enables me and our family to do everything else. In addition to our four little ones parading back to four new rooms with four new teachers, Leslie is also returning to teaching this year as a downtown public school guidance counsellor and health teacher. I'm very excited for her and her students.
This month we've been chasing the kids around, swimming in lakes, going birding, and, of course, reading books.
I've been sending my book club to you for nigh on ten years. You can read the back issues here, send me comments anytime just by replying, and, as always, I am deeply grateful for our brief connection of hearts and minds across space and time.
Invite others to join us with a flashlight under the blanket here.
Let's get to the books!
Neil
1.Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin (1927-1987). This book will crawl and sniff out the pains in your heart, the ones you forgot were there, and shake them and soften them, so you may briefly see yourself in others—in their tortures, in their truths—and then forgive yourself, and forgive them, and be grateful for where you are and what you have. At least that's what it did for me. This was James Baldwin's very first novel, published in 1952, and it's a trauma-filled family soap opera stretching across generations. It takes place in the South and then up in Harlem “…where the houses did not rise, piercing, as it seemed, the unchanging clouds, but huddled, flat, ignoble, close to the filthy ground, where the streets and the hallways and the rooms were dark, and where the unconquerable odor was of dust, and sweat, and urine, and homemade gin.” (Page 28). Issues abound! Godlessness, for one. Sister McCandless clucks on Page 53 regarding the younger generation not showing up to church: “'They cooling off something terrible. The Lord ain’t going to bless no church what lets its young people get so lax, no sir. He said, because you ain’t neither hot or cold I’m going to spit you outen my mouth. That’s the Word.'” The characters in this book are the Word. They're so clear, so detailed. The book opens in a semi-autobiographical tone with our adolescent protagonist John walking into a violent family scene and then zooms into the backstories of multiple characters before ending back up in the present. His dad becomes a brother, his aunt becomes a sister, his mom becomes a young lover with a different man. And the drama is told through vivid characters with those voices that pop. From Page 132 from Esther: “I… just want to go somewhere, go somewhere, and have my baby, and think all this out of my mind. I want to go somewhere and get my mind straight. That’s what I want you to do—and that’s pretty cheap. I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore.” Later, we’re in the living room of the holy man’s sister (so John's aunt) as she’s recounting the issues with a new friend: “'She say she think my brother’s got a bastard living right there in the same town what he’s scared to call his own.'/'No? And I thought you said your brother was a preacher.'/'Being a preacher ain’t never stopped a n— from doing his dirt.'” Reading this book feels like being outside on a day where the weather oscillates between hulking storm clouds and moments of cloud-parting sun. The plot is tricky—I highly recommend reading the Wikipedia plot summary before and during the book if you need to (like I did)—but then, once you do, once you see the layers, it's just gorgeous prose, 3D characters, and a serving of that uniquely brutal heart-scalding beauty that we really only get from great novels.
2. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futuresby Merlin Sheldrake (b. 1987). Don’t look now but while you are reading this fungi are busy “eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behaviors, and influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere.” (Page Page 3) Do you ... take statins? Drink alcohol? Eat truffles? Take antibiotics? Just a few of the hundreds of ways our lives revolve around fungi—and seemingly always have. Fungi are one of our living kingdoms, as "broad as busy a category as animals and plants," and evolved before those two. There are many historical records of our species living an entangled life with fungi seemingly since before we were us. (No wonder the glacial Iceman, that famed preserved Neolithic corpse from 5000 years ago, had a pouch stuffed with “wads of the tinder fungus that he almost certainly used to make fire, and carefully prepared fragments of the birch polypore mushroom most probably used as medicine.”) Our lives are deeply entwined with fungi and yet we know so comparatively little about them. Enter this gloriously illuminating book which serves to shrink our own lives—our worries, our fears—into the wider and vaster world of living things we make up only a tiny, tiny fraction of. Are fungi controlling us? Harvesting us? Using our minds to plant thoughts and behaviours? A fascinating middle chapter called “Mycelial minds” explores how psilocybin mushrooms (what many of us perhaps grew up knowing as 'magic mushrooms' or 'shrooms') have demonstrated an “ability to soften the rigid habits of our minds that makes these chemicals powerful medicines capable of relieving severe addictive behaviors, otherwise incurable depression, and the existential distress that can follow the diagnosis of terminal illness.” (Page 96) A Johns Hopkins study even showed that after a single dose of psilocybin, 80% of patients showed reduced “demoralization and hopelessness, improved spiritual well-being, and increased quality of life.” (Page 107). They’ve also been proven to help smokers and alcoholics break severe addictions! Big in scope, endlessly curiosity-stimulating, and arranged in an organic, haphazard, expanding-underground-network type of way this is a weird, wonderful, and impossible-to-forget look at a much bigger world outside ourselves.
3. Next To Heavenby James Frey (b. 1969). And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick—a book personally read by my saintly partner Leslie. (Btw, you can check out the full list of Leslie’s Pick’s right here.) Over to you, Les! “I still remember the rush of not being able to put down ‘A Million Little Pieces’ (9/2017) and I never even cared that there was that whole debacle over how true it all was. For me it was just a mind expanding, empathy building, rush of a ride to read and I loved it. So, when Neil handed me James Frey’s new book, ‘Next to Heaven’ I was excited to dive in. And it did not disappoint. Kind of like White Lotus in its satirical commentary on the super rich, ‘Next to Heaven’ had me turning pages late into the night, escaping into the scandalous love lives of a handful of New Bethlehem’s elite. Sexy, spicy, juicy and still somehow heartwarming and relatable.” Thank you, Les! For those interested in more James Frey (pronounced “Fry”, btw) check out this sit-down he just did with Rich Roll or my 2019 conversation with him here when he published his last novel ‘Katerina’ (09/2018).
4. All About Birds by Robert S Lemmon (1885-1964), Illustrated by Fritz Kredel (1900-1973). We have information overload today. So much everything! You can talk to chatGPT for hours and yes—you’re further along, but the sheer amount of information, nevermind the incorrect information, can feel overwhelming. I like finite. Compressed! Edited. Like: Want to learn about birds? Here’s a wonderful 136-page 20-point font sized children’s book with a lively tone. And it will feel so complete in your hands. It’s got thick, heavy paper—the kind you can slide your thumbnail across and actually indent—and orange-spot colour line drawings with captions like “When ducks preen their feathers they are really putting on oil.”, “The gannet may dive straight down from a height of fifty feet.”, and “The wingspan of an albatross may be over 11 feet.” Chapter titles include “How Many Birds Are There?” and “The Oldest Bird In The World” and “The Wonders of a Feather.” Great questions, right? So: How many birds are there? Well, “nobody has actually counted every bird, of course, but people who study wild birds believe there are about one hundred billion of them in the whole world. Right here in the United States and Canada, there are around twelve or fifteen billion.” (Page 1) Now this book was published in 1955 so is that still true? We can return to researching online and find a 2019 study in Science showing that pesticide use and habitat loss has dropped North American bird populations by 3 billion since 1970 which they say is a 29% reduction! And don’t get me started on domestic house cats which kill 1 to 4 billion wild birds a year! Children’s books are a wonderful way to learn for all of us and a great reading accelerator. A great curiosity-scratch on all things birds.
5. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen (1938-2021). I was first turned onto this book years ago by Michael Harris whose book ‘Solitude’ (11/2018) has stuck with me over the years. (Check out the highlights on my favourite pages here!) If loneliness is “alone plus sad” then solitude is “alone plus happy” and I feel like that skill is harder than ever to build nowadays. How rarely are we truly alone these days? It seems like building resilience, mental toughness, is in relative short supply. (I wrote a whole book about building resilience too and you can read the first chapter of it right here.) Most of the things I suggest are around mental scripts (“Tell yourself a different story”) and creating new personal habits (“Two-Minute Mornings”, “Untouchable Days”) but another way to go about things would be for the pilot of the prop plane you’re riding shotgun in, from your recently divorced dad in Boston to your recently divorced mom in Canada, to have a sudden heart attack mid-flight and crash land the plane in the middle of the wilderness. You’re 13! And now you’re suddenly in the woods with bears, tornados, and a barrage of inner battles. A harrowing, riveting epic of children’s literature. The back says it’s for ages 10-14 but I, of course, recommend it for adults, too. (What’s up with “max” age dates on books?) A silver seal on the cover stamps it as a Newbery Honor Book and if you’re in the market for great kids book the ALA list of Newbery winners and honors is a great place to start.
6.Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto (Updated Edition) by Shawn Micallef (b. 1974), Illustrated by Marlena Zuber. Did you have a street paper, an “alt-weekly”, in your hometown? The Village Voice (New York), The Stranger (Seattle), The Georgia Straight (Vancouver), Good Times (Santa Cruz), The Coast (Halifax), Flagpole (Georgia), or (here in Toronto) a NOW or Eye Weekly? I used to love picking up those thick, full-colour, totally free papers, in their own metal boxes all over the city, chock-full of concert listings, album reviews, edgy cartoons, passionate diatribes, phone-sex ads, and Savage Love columns (which I notice is in its 26th year and now billed as "America's Longest Running Sex Advice Column"). Anyway, that frothy breeding ground is where much of this book originated. Shawn moved to Toronto from Windsor in 2000 and began flâneuring—“someone who wanders the city with the sole purpose of paying attention to it”—as, he says, a kind of informal thesis project after years of formal school. His little notes and emails to friends evolved into a column for Eye Weekly originally titled “Stroll” and then, later, “Psychogeography” (trying saying that with a mouth full of pebbles). After newspaper ads died and most alt-weeklies died with them, Micallef took up a job in 2012 for The Toronto Star where he continues to this day. His columns are always interesting and provide a great lens for seeing this city, the fourth-largest in North America. And now we have this updated book which is a true gift to anybody who loves to walk and who lives (or is visiting!) Toronto. This book adds colour, context, whimsy, and history to 31 different long-walks in and around the Toronto area from “CN Tower” to “Islands” to “Hydro Corridor” to “Rouge Park.” His charmingly erudite writing is a delight to read and he quotes novels, park plaques, and bits of arcane trivia throughout, which lets your mind wander as you wander with him. Like from Page 52 in “Toronto Islands”: “Visiting the islands during winter is a magical thing. There’s barely a lineup for the ferry, just some intrepid winter souls and island residents. Outside, on deck, the sound of the ferry pushing through chunks of ice is like a giant cocktail glass swirling. The skyscrapers pump out steam and the city hums, as if it’s collectively trying to keep warm.” With a giant pull-out colour map and little illustrations throughout from the talented Marlena Zuber. A must for all Toronto flâneurs and flâneurs-to-be.
7.Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o (1938-2025). “Nyokabi called him. She was a small, black woman, with a bold but grave face. One could tell by her small eyes full of life and warmth that she had once been beautiful. But time and bad conditions do not favour beauty. All the same, Nyokabi had retained her full smile – a smile that lit up her dark face.” That’s the opening paragraph of his 1964 debut novel by Pulitzer Prize nominated Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, who just died three months ago. Tight, spare language, but dressed into a slightly more abstract structure, we get a powerful story of a young boy named Njoroge who lives with his brother, father, two moms (his dad has two wives), in Kenya, right as it’s starting to decolonize. My mom was born in Nairobi in 1950 and I heard isolated tales of her childhood growing up in this brown, black, and white mixed-race country as it jostled towards independence. (I write about my mom’s story in the first chapter of my book on resilience.) This book continued to colour in many of the lines as it tells the story of Kenya from the view of the natives. After a slowish start, the book picks up about sixty pages in when an older brother with a grim disposition visits home and helps the community push towards a labor strike and from there emerge demonstrations, riots, trials, the Mau Mau uprising, lots of violence, attempted suicides, and a slowly dimming future for Njoroge. I haven’t read much (any?) African literature so this felt like a good place to start. (Got suggestions on what to read next?)
8. Neil's Reading Light Recommendation. There is no 8! Normally I close things off with a loot bag of links but this month I’ll share just one: A reading light! I put two of them in the picture above. We have about seven now. This is hands down the best reading light I’ve found and I’ve tried so many over the years: headbands, red lights, extendable-ET-neck things. I have no affiliation with whatever Chinese factory makes this light but we’ve come to love them and bought one for all our kids. Pack them in camp bags! Leave them under pillows! Stuff them in suitcases! It’s perfect: USB powered, no wires or cables (just needs one of those old white iPhone charging blocks with a USB hole in it), needs charging like twice a year, has three different lights (yellow, white, light blue), five brightnesses, a metal fold-out arm that you can attach to your book’s back cover, and even a little bendable head on top. Sometimes I just leave it lying on my chest and point it up at the book for that flashlight-under-the-blanket feel. (Doesn't it always feel good to read in that light? It makes reading a secret between you and the book somehow.) Anyway, we’ve never had a single one break, the buttons are super intuitive (no manual or need for one!), and it’s just … perfect. Here is the company website or links on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk. I collect zero affiliate or sponsor money from any links here or anywhere in my emails. If you want to support this endeavor (thank you!) ... I present a platter of my books! Just click the photo and send one to someone you love. I recommend the top two!)
