Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - January 2025

Hey everyone,

For most of my adult life I read 4 or 5 books a year. Not much! I read a lot as a kid but found my adult self reading newspapers, scrolling blogs, skimming Twitter.

Then I started dating someone new. She came back to my apartment and said “Where are all your books?” I had a shelf ... with not many books on it. Well, that woman is now my wife and she helped remind me how much I loved reading and how much better I feel—now as a husband, a dad, a friend, a writer—when I've intentionally spent time reading books versus letting my brain dissolve into the endless online information abyss. Today I read around 75 books a year and have a ​series of reading systems​ to keep this up.

This book club email is one of those systems! It's just a summary and review of every book I've read over the past month. I know I have to send it to you! So that keeps me reading. And I always love when you reply and share your reading list back with me.

For now: We still control our attention! So let's aim to keep turning off screens and picking up books. Let's delete social media and news media apps off our phone. Let's renew our library cards. And let's vision at the end of our lives having a giant bookshelf full of books we've read and grown from instead of a stack of old yellowed newspapers in the basement and some blurry long-forgotten scroll of soundbites and tweets.

It's harder than ever to read books these days! You help me keep the habit up and I hope I help you too. As I enter my ​10th year of writing this book club​ I want to say thank you for being here.

Please invite others to join us ​here​.

Now let's hit the books!

Neil

1. Balanced and Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children by Angela J. Hanscom. Parenting is hot! Suddenly everyone has a take. Tim Ferriss released back-to-back superlong chats with viral influencers ​Dr. Becky Kennedy​ (‘​Good Inside​​9/2022​) and ​Aaron Stupple​ (‘​The Sovereign Child​’). But I have a reminder from our grandmas: There are infinite ways to parent. Hands-on, hands-off, lots of rules, hardly any, structured and inside or, in the case of this book, unstructured and outside. You do you! No one way is perfect. I think of our job as learning as much as we can—doing the best we can. Brilliant and effervescent Ginny Yurich (of ​1000 Hours Outside​) recommended this to me and I took so much from it. Angela Hanscom is a pediatric occupational therapist who tells us that our kids are getting fragile, frail, and fidgety because they’re sitting and staring at screens while starving their bodies of unstructured outdoor play. On page 13 she shares a study comparing kid strength from 1998 to 2008—only 10 years!—and shows the # of sit ups 10-year-olds could do bombed 27.1%, arm strength plummeted 26%, and grip strength sank 7%. Why? Not enough time climbing trees, jumping off rocks, making up their own games with their own rules. She talks about how free play develops our eyesight, our skeletal systems, and loads more. One fun example: Spinning! Do you ever see kids just ... spinning in circles ... looking completely nuts? Sure, all the time. And what do adults say? “Stop! Sit down! You could get hurt!” But “spinning stimulates the vestibular sense which helps them become more coordinated, sure-footed, and less likely to trip or run into things.” Research shows spinning “activates hair cells on the inner ear which sends motor messages through the spinal cord which helps maintain muscle tone and body posture.” Yes, your vestibular sense​ lays the foundation for other senses and “spinning leads to alertness, attention, and a sense of calm in the classroom.” Way back in the Internet paleotlithic I wrote an essay on ​1000 Awesome Things​ celebrating “​Old, dangerous playground equipment​.” Now it looks prophetic with books like this and ‘The Anxious Generation’ (​4/2024​) calling for a return to too-tall teeter-totters, monkey bars in the sky, and big spinners where everyone falls dizzily down the hill afterwards. The book is a little stiffly written—a little study after study after study—and, sure, I wish it had pictures or more of a freewheeling tone (like ‘Free Range Kids’ ​5/2023​) but it’s still really wonderful, and a much-needed reminder that many of our ails can be cured by ditching endless programs and just getting outside. How much? Well, Ginny says 1000 hours a year and she's made a bunch of ​handy trackers​ for those who want to systemize it. (You know I love the ​power of 1000​.) Highly recommended.

2. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Did you know that in Ireland from 1765 to 1996 a series of state- and Catholic-run ‘​Magdalene Laundries​’ housed and locked up ‘fallen women,’ the definition of which originally meant sex workers but grew to include orphans, victims of rape or incest, any woman abandoned by her family, and any woman who didn’t conform to the rules of society? I ... did not. This 2022 Booker shortlisted book follows Keegan's 2010 stunner ‘Foster’ (​9/2023​) and takes a slow pan shot of a couple wintry months in New Ross, Ireland in 1985. We see the world through the eyes of a local upstanding businessman, Bill Furlong, as he wrestles with what he discovers up on the hill. Here’s the book's opening paragraph: “In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain.” You’re right there. Keegan is “as good as Chekhov,” ​David Mitchell​ says, and I agree. The book is like a poem in a play. And at 13 point font, 1.5 spacing, and 119 pages, you can actually read the whole thing quickly and feel good about yourself. Great one to kick off the year! Highly recommended.

3. Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Back in like 2010 I was sitting on my swively chair in my Walmart HR department cubicle late on a Friday afternoon. Everyone was racing off for the weekend but I was still fairly recently divorced and in no rush to head downtown to an empty apartment with no plans. I wandered the halls and stepped into a dark training room. Motion-sensor neon flickered on illuminating a whiteboard, couple easels, and an old laminate bookshelf with a couple dozen books. ‘​The Tipping Point​,’ ‘​Good To Great​,’ ‘​How To Win Friends And Influence People​.’ And a book I’d never heard of but was immediately drawn to ... I decided to grab it for the weekend:

 
 

I say with all sincerity that book changed my life. It helped me realize how random everything is—much more random than we think!—and how ‘black swan events’ (disproportionately huge things with big impact) are really unpredictable. So to ‘win’ at whatever you want to win in, you have to make small bets. You have no idea what'll work! Nobody does. For me that meant ​saying yes​. Trying things! Expanding my ‘what I do’ mentality to include things like writing a ​kids book​, giving ​keynote speeches​, starting ​a podcast​ and, yes, ​writing email newsletters​. Just keep trying and then you’ll eventually see what takes off—internally and externally. Well, ‘Antifragile’ is the 2012 sequel to the 2007 ‘The Black Swan’ (​11/2016​) and it's the final book by hedge-fund-manager-turned-philospher-king Nassim Nicholas Taleb. You can flip past seemingly endless pages of Contents and Notes to the opening paragraph which comes on page 31: “You are in the post office about to send a gift, a package full of champagne glasses, to a cousin in central Siberia.” What do you label the box? Fragile, right? But now: what’s the opposite? No, it’s not “resilient” or “robust,” because that would be for items that “neither break nor improve.” As Taleb says: “Logically, the exact opposite of a ‘fragile’ parcel would be a package on which one has written ‘please mishandle’ or ‘please handle carelessly’ ... we give the appellation ‘antifragile’ to such a package; a neologism was necessary as there is no simple, noncompound word in the Oxford English Dictionary that expresses the point of reverse fragility.” The concept is both new and old. I mean: what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right? But to enjoy, embrace, and enhance our lives with small pains—so we may improve—isn't always obvious. Taleb says fragile is the “New York Banking system” and antifragile is “Silicon Valley’s ‘Fail Fast’ and ‘Be Foolish’” adages. He says fragile is “Classroom” and antifragile is “Real life and library,” fragile is “post-traumatic stress” and antifragile is “post-traumatic growth,” fragile is “e-readers” and antifragile is “oral tradition,” fragile in finance is “short option” and antifragile is “long option.” This is the final of his four-book ‘Incerto’ set that also includes ‘Fooled By Randomness’ (2003) and a smaller book of aphorisms, with the entire series seeking to investigate “opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don’t understand the world, expressed in the form of a personal essay with autobiographical sections, stories, parables, and philosophical, historical, and scientific discussions in nonoverlapping volumes that can be accessed in any order.” He's a bit of a mouthful, right? But he’s so brilliant, and he presents the information like a tart old professor who likes to pause and wink a lot. From why you should eat vegan once a week (“Deprivation is a stressor”) to fascinating The Lindy Effect, this book is so wide-minded and feels like some kind of 14-layer dip for your brain. A good one to dip in and out of and keep applying back to your life. Highly recommended.

4. Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. This is ​one of Nick Sweetman’s 3 most formative books​. And I love Nick Sweetman! He’s a magical graffiti artist who decorates the streets of Toronto with spray paint images of (mostly) wild animals doing wild animal things against the backdrop of our increasing concrete jungle:

I mean, look at the eye on that ​Hooded Merganser​. Look at that beak! How does he do it? It was an honor partnering 3 Books with Nick to create a 750-square foot mural of 16 local bird species at Toronto's ​Dupont subway station​. ​Here’s Nick’s Instagram post​ announcing the wall and the 3 Books documentary​ we just dropped on the full moon that just passed. (Btw I finally figured out how to disable those annoying YouTube ads from ​my YouTube channel​ so you can ​watch the whole thing ad-free​. Since 2008 all my blog posts, newsletters, podcasts, and now YouTube videos are ad, sponsor, and commercial-free. If you want to support my stuff ​buy a book​!) Anyway, uh, where were we? ‘Day of the Triffids’! Yes, read ‘Day of the Triffids’! A 1951 post-apocalyptic slow-paced horror show that served as inspiration for films like ‘​28 Days Later​.’ The book opens with everyone on earth observing an incredible “celestial spectacle” as the earth flies through some comet debris. Well, almost everyone! Our narrator was getting surgery at the hospital that day and his “eyes, indeed my whole head, should be wreathed in bandages.” But then what? Everyone goes blind the next day! Whoops! And then these giant Venus-fly-trap-like plants start taking over the earth. If you liked ‘The Chrysalids’ (​2/2018​), this is slower, darker, deeper, meatier. And, if you’re like Nick Sweetman, who also recommended ‘The World Without Us’ by Alan Weisman (​7/2024​), you maybe … on some level … find the book inspiring. As Nick says, “200 years without humans every city on earth would be gone without a trace. That is exciting to me.”

5. The Monster At The End Of This Book written by Jon Stone, illustrated by Mike Smollin. A few years ago I asked on Twitter, “​What's one book you loved as a kid that's still sits on your bookshelf today?​” This comes to mind first for me! (‘​Sideways Stories From Wayside School​’ by ​Louis Sacher​ is a close second.) My tattered hardcover still has my sister’s clunky 10-year-old name handwritten inside and we’ve had to put packing tape on the inside spine to hold it together:

I still read this book to my kids all the time. It has incredible never-ending appeal as Grover keeps begging you, the reader, to stop flipping pages, because he’s terrified of the monster at the end of this book.

Is this the OG interactive picture book? It came out in 1971! (I can squint see I have the Little Golden Book’s 22nd printing from 1982.) Maybe you could argue there was ‘​Pat The Bunny​’ (1940) with its stuffed cotton or ‘​The Very Hungry Caterpillar​’ (1960) with its baby-finger-sized holes, but nothing really broke the fourth wall like this book and it came decades before ‘​Press Here​’ by Hervé Tullet or ‘​Tap The Magic Tree’​ by Christie Matheson. (I borrowed the concept myself with ‘​Awesome Is Everywhere​,’ my 2015 picture book where you ‘tap the earth’ to zoom all the way underwater and deep into the sand). I recommend not buying the (smaller) board book version of this and getting a big picture book instead where you can really fall into it. (There are good used copies on ​Abe​ or ​ThriftBooks​). There’s just such commitment to form here. The delightfully popping images, the escalating tension, the violent smashing of brick walls and ropes—it's an action movie for five-year-olds. Highly recommended.

6. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto. A 1992 collection of essays and speech transcripts by 30-year public school teacher John Taylor Gatto who won the New York State Teacher of the Year award. Gatto is a fiery activist and I love him! It’s so refreshing hearing someone on the inside of the school system pick it all apart and put it back together again. Let’s start with the fact that he decries bells! Get rid of bells! “Indeed the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do.” He talks about how the system squashes intrinsic motivation and fills brainspace with extrinsic motivators, too. (I write about this in the “Do It For You” chapter of ‘​The Happiness Equation​.’) How does he put it? “By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestinated chain of command.” Fast forward from 1992 to today and now we've got views and likes and comments and shares. We have digitally altered our brains into valuing what we can see and measure over everything we can’t and don’t—like nature, time outside, eye contact, touch, and ​holding hands​. Things like ​awesome things​. Things that, indeed, help us become antifragile. As Zachary Slayback writes in the foreword: “The best teacher I had was one who signed passes so students could skip other classes to go to her classroom and work on whatever they wanted. The worst were those obsessed with meeting state-mandated standards.” What’s the takeaway, parents? Take your foot off the gas. Don’t worry about organized sports every night. Let your kids wander. Let them dream. Let them get bored. Let them hang around outside. Let them see and observe what's compulsory and then make space for them to do anything but.

7. The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus: A Roman Slave by Publius Syrus. Over 2000 years ago a Roman slave named Publius Syrus went from captured and shipped to successful playwright. Why don’t we know his plays? They were burned! Destroyed! Lost! Gone, forever, to the eternities. What remains are 1087 pithy aphorisms that survived millennia, many likely culled from the plays, and which today fill a 44-page pamphlet-sized book. (Yes, I am officially adding this to our “​Great Books Under 150 Pages​” and our “​Enlightened Bathroom Reader​” series.) Syrus’s messages don’t fit neatly into any category which is partly why they’re fun to read. Stoic, Epicurean, Skeptic, Cynic? No. They’re just little bonks to the brain. From #1 “As men we are all equal in the presence of death” to #2 “The evil you do to others you may expect in return” to #4 “To dispute a drunkard is to debate an empty house” to #18 “Do not find your happiness in another’s sorrow” to #19 “An angry lover tells himself many lies” to #155 “A god can hardly disturb a man truly happy” to #216 “There is no need of spurs when the horse is running away” all the way up to #1087 “Man’s life is short; and therefore an honorable death is his immortality.” I learned about this book via ​Lindyman​ who wrote about this and other books of aphorisms in his August 2024 Lindy Newsletter “​Don’t Give Up On Reading Just Yet​.” Publius stands the test of time. Very Lindy! Chances are we may still be reading him in another 2000 years. Highly recommended.

8. A Pattern Language: Towns – Buildings – Construction by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. Weird title, great book! Maybe this hefty 1189-page butter yellow 1977 Oxford University Press book should have been called “The Architect and Urban Planner’s Bible” or just “How To Build A City, From Scratch, With Instructions On Everything From Neighborhood Density To Window Sizes To Street Width To Park Size To Grave Site Location To Number of Bus Stops Annnnd How These And Everything Else Affect How We Live.” I skipped most of the construction bits but ate up the social and cultural stuff. Like on page 115 where the authors, who spent over a decade with a 6-person team putting this thing together, write about “Tall Buildings” in a section called “Finding Solace In The City”: “There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy … High buildings have no genuine advantage, except in speculative gains for banks and land owners. They are not cheaper, they do not help create open space, they destroy the townscape, they destroy social life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open spaces near them, and they damage light and air and view. But quite apart from all this, empirical evidence shows that they can actually damage people’s minds and feelings.” They go on to suggest a four-story limit and show cities where this works—and why. And this isn’t some lightweight saying it! Christopher Alexander received the first-ever PhD in Architecture from Harvard and went on to teach Architecture for decades at University of California, Berkeley. He and his team never stop crashing cymbals either. On page 216 he writes about the city principle of “Old People Everywhere”: “… when elderly communities are too isolated or too large, they damage young and old alike. The young in other parts of town, have no chance of the benefit of older company, and the old people themselves are far too isolated … contemporary society shunts away old people; and the more shunted away they are, the deeper the rift between the old and the young … And the segregation of the old causes the same rift inside each individual life; as old people pass into old age communities their ties with their own past become unacknowledged, lost, and therefore broken. Their youth is no longer alive in their old age—the two become dissociated; their lives are cut in two.” I thought about this book a lot—even around seeming-innocuous things like whether to invite my mom over for dinner on a busy night. The answer? Do it! This book cites a 1945 Yale University Press book on ‘The Role of the Aged in Primitive Society’ which says “Some degree of prestige for the aged seems to have been practically universal in all known societies. … Frequently the very young and the very old have been left together at home while the able-bodied have gone forth to earn the family living. These oldsters, in their wisdom and experience, have protected and instructed the little ones, while the children, in turn, have acted as the ‘eyes, ears, hands, and feet’ of their feeble old friends.” This is a massive book I have spent hours with and still feel like I have only scratched the surface. Seismic! Definitive! Even the creator of SimCity says this was one of his inspirations ... and five decades later it’s still in print. An epic tome building and building well. Highly recommended.

9. There is no 9! Just our regular lootbag of links. First up, I have not been able to get a copy of Mel Robbins's new book ‘​The Let Them Theory​.’ Literally every bookstore in Canada is sold out. It sold 800,000 copies in the first three weeks (!) so I'm hoping to finally find one and review it for you soon. Here are some ​things I've learned from Mel​ and here she is ​on 3 Books. I also talked in the intro about the challenge of reading these days and wanted to mention that if you need help try taking my friend ​@alexandbooks_​ new course called ‘​The Art of Reading​.’ I love Alex's ​reading newsletter​, too. Readers, unite! I already love walking and ​Dan Go has given me another reason​ to keep it up. A Peter Attia podcast on ​meaningful experiences > full savings account​. ​Nora McInerny​ has a ​new call-in podcast​. Who are you ​cheering for​ in the NFL conference championships? “​You can read Siddartha 100 times and still be blown away on the 101st​.” A reasonable ​Canadian currency discussion​. ​Adam Grant tells us​ our "attention spans increase with practice." And ​a graph​ I can't stop thinking about. Lastly, if you want me in your inbox every single day you can also get my ​daily awesome thing​—18 years running now! Thanks for reading all the way to to very end...