Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - June 2025

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Hey everyone,

Was your June overwhelming, too?

We had our ​last day of school​ up here yesterday and it was a sweaty finish with approximately zero air-conditioned public schools and a blistering heat wave in the 40s/110s (Celsius/Fahrenheit).

But we made it!

This coming Tuesday is July 1st—Canada Day!—and I just made a little 78-page full-colour hardcover called ‘Canada Is Awesome.’ I’m proud of it! The publishers all said no—“Not enough runway", “Too timely”, “Doesn’t fit our vision”—so I did it myself. I am posting the whole thing for free online and selling it at cost.

But lots more to share so let’s get to it!

Neil

P.S. Invite others to join us ​here​.

1. ​Canada is Awesome: A Little Book About a Big Country​ by Neil Pasricha (b. 1979). I think it was this tweet back in February that really got me going:

I had a visceral reaction. It was twisted into prolonged news coverage about Trump’s “51st state” comments, Justin Trudeau’s “not a snowball’s chance in hell” reaction, and much ​snarky online dialogue​ that followed. I love Canada! Lived here my whole life. I spent one summer in New York, a couple years in Boston, but the rest of my 45 years I’ve lived in Canada. I grew up with my dad telling my sister and me that we were lucky to be here. “The land of opportunity!” he’d say. And he would know. My dad was born in a village in ​Punjab, India​ in 1944. His mom died when he was 3 and he grew up sharing a small bedroom with three brothers and a sister. Twenty-two years later, while doing his Masters in Nuclear Physics at the University of New Delhi, he went to the library and looked up a list of the best countries in the world. He didn’t speak the language of the Scandinavian countries so he went down the list a little and applied to Canada and the US. He got the letter back from Canada first. My dad’s sense of wonder was this sunbeam over my childhood. It has resulted in this feeling about Canada—how we live, what we value, what that represents—which I’ve tried to articulate in a little book. This is a complete passion project. There’s probably good reason the publishers said no. Stocking tiny little books, about tiny little things, is ... hard. Penguin Random House, Simon&Schuster, House of Anansi? None of them wanted to print it. But I wanted to. So I did. You can get it ​right here on Amazon.ca​ (hardcover or paperback), right ​here on Amazon.com​ (hardcover or paperback), ​here​ as a free and complete Audiobook (​Spotify​, ​Apple​, ​YouTube​), and on Canada Day I'll post the whole thing on my blog and share a free downloadable PDF, too. Post the whole thing? Bad way to sell books! I know. And I don’t care. I made the book for the people who want it and am selling it for exactly what it costs to produce it. I make precisely zero dollars and zero cents on every sale. You can see a picture of the hardcover in the photo above, see the page I made for it ​here​, and here’s some inside pages, too:

In this era of political and algorithmic whiplashing I wanted to create a sense of grounding around my favourite country. Last year ​more​ and ​more​ articles showed Canada is still tops in the world for the best places to move—best places to live. This little book is my attempt to explain why. I hope you like it.

2. ​Learning All the Time: How small children begin to read, write, count, and investigate the world, without being taught​ by John Holt (1923-1985). I didn’t know this book existed and I didn’t know I needed it! But it does and I did. Big thank you to ​Ginny Yurich​ (“yer-itch”) of ​1000 Hours Outside​ and ‘​Homeschooling​’ for introducing me to this book on ​our long walk around frigid Toronto with Leslie a few months ago​. Once you flip through this book you start seeing how your children are learning everything, on their own, by themselves, and you start seeing your job as removing obstacles and staying quiet and calm like a tree so they keep going. Like right now my 6-year-old is learning to read and right from the beginning John reminds us that “whether you’re a ‘gifted’ five-year-old or a terrified, illiterate twelve-year-old, trying to read something new is a dangerous adventure. You may make mistakes, or fail, and so feel disappointment or shame, or anger, or disgust. Just in order to get started on this adventure, most people need as much comfort, reassurance, and security as they can find. The typical classroom, with other children ready to point out, correct, and even laugh at every mistake … is the worst possible place for a child to begin.” This book came out in 1989 and is an accessible and warm place to start for anybody interested in what might today be called ​unschooling​. A real treasure.

3. ​My Years As Prime Minister​ by Jean Chrétien (b. 1934). Over the last couple months I’ve been to Dallas, Vancouver, Las Vegas, Barcelona, Ottawa, Chicago, Dallas again, Ranchos Palos Verde, and then I got home and there were a couple calls and suddenly I had one more trip to make. So I put on a suit and tie and flew back to Ottawa to meet the 91-year-old man my wife Leslie calls “the grandfather of Canada.” The Right Honourable Jean Chrétien is one of the longest-serving Prime Ministers in Canadian history and led three successive majority terms as leader of the Liberal Party from 1993 to 2003. He ​famously said no to joining the US in the Iraq War​ (solidifying Canada’s independence on foreign policy), signed the ​Kyoto Protocol​ (committing Canada to its first-ever international environmental agreement), established the ​Oceans Act​ (helping Canada become the first country to prioritize ocean health), created the ​Clarity Act​ (to establish terms for future secession movements after the ​Quebec Referendum of 1995​), and led ​Operation Yellow Ribbon​ to help 40,000 Americans in the air and traveling through Canada on September 11, 2001 and beyond. If you don’t know Jean Chrétien I recommend starting with the ​room-rousing speech he gave this past March​ on the night Mark Carney became Prime Minister. If you do know him, or just want to know him better, read this book. Chrétien has an incredible way of getting to the nub of an issue, talking about it in a plainspoken way, and using humor and charm to get what he needs to get done done. Like at the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec which he recounts on page 292: “The summit coincided with a small but irritating border dispute in which American potato growers managed to obtain a ban on imports from Prince Edward Island after the discovery of a harmless ‘potato wart’ on the produce from one remote farm. So I gave instructions that PEI potatoes were to be served to President Bush at every meal. During the last lunch, at a NAFTA trilateral meeting held in the Citadel looking over the St. Lawrence River and north to the Laurentian Hills, Colin Powell turned to Bush and, translating the French menu, said, ‘He’s still serving us PEI potatoes.’ // ‘You see George,’ I said, ‘you’ve been eating PEI potatoes for two days now, and you’re still alive. So tell your guys in Washington that they’re wrong.’ Apparently he did, because the problem was quickly solved.” This 2007 book pulses with endless anecdotes and stories like this one and his trademark Canadian drive, grit, and determination are on full display. I am excited to share that the Right Honourable Jean Chrétien ​will be my guest on the next chapter of 3 Books​. Look up to the sky and it will drop when the moon is fully full. When I got to his office his assistant told me “We don’t do hour-long interviews … ever.” Well, I guess he’s now done one! This was a true honour and I can't wait to share it with you. Subscribe to the podcast on ​Apple​, ​Spotify​, or ​YouTube​ to listen when the chapter is released.

4. ​Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore​ by Robin Sloan. You’re playing Super Mario Kart for Super Nintendo. The original! And then this screen pops up. Who did you pick?

Let me guess: Koopa or Toad? Me too. Best all-rounders! Peach or Yoshi were fine. Mario or Luigi in a pinch. But no way anyone took DK or Bowser. Even though they had the highest top speeds! Acceleration? Too slow! Control? Too hard! For novice drivers sliding off Ghost Valleys they were a nightmare. But I will tell you this: Once, when I was at my cousin’s birthday party, he had this friend over who was some kind of Mario Kart savant and he actually played with DK or Bowser. And he won! Every time! Slow acceleration, careful steering, incredible top speed. That’s DK. That’s Bowser. And that’s ‘Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore’ by Robin Sloan. This book was a big surprise to me! I read and loved ‘Moonbound’ (​8/2024​) when it came out last year. My friend ​Michael Bungay-Stanier​ texted me saying he loved it and since I love Michael’s mind that was enough. The book blew me away and I put it in ​my best books of the year​. ‘Moonbound’ was my Robin Sloan opener. Then I went back to read this Robin Sloan classic (which, btw, boasts 213,568 Goodreads ratings to Moonbound’s still-pretty-high-otherwise 3,611). The back of Mr. Penumbra features the remarkably rare blurber 1-2 punch of ​Roxane Gay​ (“...eminently enjoyable, full of warmth and intelligence.”) and ​George Saunders​ (“It's a lot of fun, a real tour de force.”). And the book opens with a captivating scene: “Lost in the shadows of the shelves, I almost fall off the ladder. I am exactly halfway up. The floor of the bookstore is far below me, the surface of a planet I’ve left behind.” The thing you don’t realize is that he’s up, like, stories. Hapless Clay Jannon has just lost his design job for a San Francisco bagel company started by ex-Googlers. Why? Well, because of “the great food-chain contraction that swept through America in the early twenty-first century,” of course. Anyway, he needs a job. So he starts at this random downtown bookstore located beside a strip club. The bookstore has few customers. Like almost none. And the customers seem to ask for their next books in codes. The pace starts accelerating. And accelerating. And accelerating. Soon you’re on sudden cross-country flights and in dark chatrooms and creeping through subterranean lairs and having lunch in Google cafeterias and talking about secrets to immortality and I tell you there are just enough light feathery turns to keep you in this wonderfully bubbly type of nerd-out suspense. Early on the book has a short-chapter-acceleration that feels kind of like ‘​Angels and Demons​’ by Dan Brown or ‘​The Martian​’ by Andy Weir. The whole thing is some kind of magic trick and a perfect volley to the stunning ‘Moonbound’ afterwards. To get a taste for Robin Sloan try reading his blog (like his February post on AI called “​Is it okay?​”) or join his ​wonderfully geeky newsletter​ appearing exactly every 29 and a ½ days. The world needs more Robin Sloan!

5. “​The Smartphones Haven’t Defeated Us. Yet.​” By Jonathan Haidt, Will Johnson, and Zach Rausch. I grew up with one phone in the kitchen. Over there. On the wall. A benign presence. We had to make sure we had a quarter in our pockets when we got dropped at the mall so we could call home later. Today I’ve had a smartphone for, geez, 15 years, and I’ve barely felt the slow sponging and soaking in of our now-omnipresent phone-everywhere culture. Our phones have pulverized free time, wandering time, daydreaming time. They have decimated solitude, quiet, and space. We have become more frazzled, frenetic, and mentally fractured. We have the highest rates of ​anxiety​, ​depression​, and ​loneliness​ we’ve ever seen. It’s time to email our politicians! I’ve just emailed my Canadian Member of Parliament (​find yours here​!) and Ontario Member of Provincial Parliament (​find yours here​!) to share this article and ask for a phone ban in classrooms. It’s a start. The link above—​and right here!​—is a link you can share with anyone. We need to unite to ask for schools to be phone-free from bell to bell. Unconvinced? Read this article. Read it! It’s written by ​Jon Haidt​, author of ‘The Anxious Generation’ (​4/2024​), and it summarizes the current state of things. We have a nice little teetering right now but need a concerted push for it to tip. Ten states have now enacted laws to make their schools phone-free. Red states, blue states, doesn’t matter. We're looking for phone-free schools—from bell to bell. This is above political divides. When even Gen Z itself is saying they “express regret about having access to many of the most popular social media platforms” and in new surveys many parents say they “wish social media had never been invented,” it is time. Let’s bring back childhood! Read this article, share this article, contact your politician. Thank you, Jon Haidt, for your strength and galvanizing leadership. (Btw, if you haven’t read ‘The Anxious Generation’ and want the quick version here are ​Part 1​ and ​Part 2​ of my favourite pages from the book.) Let's do this!

6. ​Black Swan Green​ by David Mitchell (b. 1969). I recently made a ​video​ and ​podcast​ of ‘5 Beach Books to Stretch Your Mind.’ This is one book on my list! (I’ll leave the other four a surprise and you can get the whole chat on ​Apple​, ​Spotify​, or ​YouTube​.) OK, let me say up front: I think ​David Mitchell​ is my favourite living novelist and I think this is the book of his to start with. Sure, he’s a lot more famous for ‘Cloud Atlas’ (​6/2019​) published in 2004—partly because of the (very good!) Wachowski-directed Tom Hanks and Halle Berry ​movie it inspired​—but I think that book is too genre-bendy to begin with. So if you go with ‘Black Swan Green,’ his 2006 ​bildungsroman​, instead then it will prime you just perfectly for the Mitchellverse, the term David Mitchell fans use to describe the overarching ever-expanding relationships between all his books and characters. Let’s start with the plot: “It’s a dank January in the Worcestershire village of Black Swan Green and thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor—covert stammerer and reluctant poet—anticipates a stultifying year in the deadest village on Earth. But Jason hasn’t reckoned with a junta of bullies, simmering family discord, the Falklands War, an exotic Belgian emigre, a threatened gypsy invasion and the caprices of those mysterious entities known as girls.” Junta of bullies? Mitchell’s turns of phrase always delight. The plot moves, the narrator is entrancing, and within a couple of pages you fall right into being a 13-year-old overthinking nerdy boy. (I, uh, could relate.) From page 4: “Moron’s my height and he’s okay but Jesus he pongs of gravy. Moron wears ankle-flappers from charity shops and lives down Drugger’s End in a brick cottage that pongs of gravy too.” The paragraph continues and expands into this remarkable history of his friends nicknames, friend nickname origins, and friend nickname rankings. This is a book I wish would go on forever and one I have on my permanent reread list. ‘Black Swan Green’ just glimmers like a diamond.

7. ​Playtown: Emergency: A Lift-The-Flap Book​ by Roger Priddy. OK, now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick. Over to you, Les: “We were first gifted the original ‘​Playtown​’ when our oldest turned two and it has been a family favourite since. Neil and I almost have the text memorized, the flaps are tattered (especially the one where someone is caught using the toilet on the train!), and each kid has their favourite page (airport, construction site, zoo, or main street). We’ve read that one a LOT but not as many times as we’ve read ‘Playtown: Emergency.’ Our youngest son went through a good period of about eight months where this was the book he wanted to read EVERY SINGLE NIGHT (he also likes to wear the exact same clothes every day—he was a tiger for several months, then a skeleton for a month, and now he wears a full soccer kit all day every day including shin pads and knee high socks in 32-degree humidity). Repetition and control seem to be big things for him? Maybe it’s being the youngest of four, maybe it’s being a deeply feeling child, maybe it’s because the world is a big and confusing place and reading the same gosh darn book every night at least gives him one predictable part of the day. And so, the other day, when he asked for this old favourite again, it was clear to me he needed some comfort and familiarity, some reassurance that each problem has a solution, that each question has an answer. And that’s what ‘Playtown Emergency’ does. It’s not overly profound—in fact I’ve often wished there was a bit more complexity like maybe a second flap behind each emergency worker showing them at home thinking about hopes or fears—but it does what it does really well. Which is give young readers a window into what happens at a hospital, what types of fire vehicles are used, and what are some different types of rescue teams. It makes the world feel understandable. It opens conversation about when we’ve been to the hospital or how there are helpers all around and it makes the fear and excitement of emergencies (are injury stories also a favourite around your dinner table!?) something to connect over after a busy day. This book gives us all the feeling that there are some predictable, simple, “lift the flap” explanations in this loud and chaotic world we live in.” (Note: This review has been added to ​Leslie’s Picks​.)

8. ​Minnow: Issue 2​, Winter/Spring 2025. I’m back into zines! It happened suddenly. Do you have a favourite zine? Or just one you recommend? When I was part of a six-person junta of 16-year-olds co-founding my high school newspaper we designed it as a zine and called it ‘Headrush.’ (Shoutout to 'Headrush' co-founders Michelle Jayakumar, Garry Liu, Lawny Graham, Tanya Hunter, and Romi Raina.) We put it together and hawked it in hallways with a sour key for fifty cents. Give us your quarters, we’ll give you our zine. I just loved zines. Their accessibility, earnest amateurness, their fine-pointed focus, their screaming passion, their manifesto-cum-chapbook-cum-samizdat type energy. They’re also super skinny! So easy to read. A fat zine is no zine! I was having lunch at ​Mi Madre’s​ down in Austin, Texas with ​Austin Kleon​ ​a couple years ago​ and he gave me a copy of his zine called ‘Read Like An Artist.’ I loved it! He’s ​posted it online​. And more recently Robin Sloan (of the aforementioned ‘Mr. Penumbra’s’) has gotten into zines. He’s started making them! For himself. And selling them ​right here​! He says he wants them to carry the spirit of “energy and ephemerality.” I love that. He’s even changed his biography online from “writer” to “writer, printer, and manufacturer” zine-infusing himself! So, anyway, yeah, it was in this spirit, this zine-open spirit, that I stumbled upon a shelf of zines at a local coffee shop. The cover for ‘Minnow’ caught me as it was focused on “conservation in the Great Lakes region and species often overlooked.” I bought it started flipping and was met with a 7-page article called “Queer Ecology” with stunning photos of ​Northern green frogs​ and ​Jack-in-the-Pulpit​ plants (which can both change their sex!) and then met a local group of salamanders that are “entirely female and reproduce without having sex.” Okay! Sure! I kept flipping and learned all about the fascinating ​Eastern hognose snake​ (and learned I should befriend and respect it rather than fear it) and then met a local community group called "Water Watchers" who self-formed in Wellington, Ontario 18 years ago after a big company moved in and started draining their lakes for bottled water. (An industry, I learned, which uses 10 billion [!] litres of oil a year in Canada alone.) I kept flipping and learned about the plight of the chattering ​Chimney Swifts​ whose population has declined 90% in Ontario due to less old growth forests with giant dead hollowed trees and more recently a lot less ... wait for it ... chimneys. Ultimately this zine gave me that exact energetic ephemerality I love from zines and zine culture. Here's a couple other zines I picked up from Hard Feelings, the downtown Toronto mental health centre and bookstore run by the incredible ​Kate Scowan​:

Bold! Strong! Passionate! Economical! Long live zines. Reply and let me know if you have a favourite zone I should check out. And for those who want to make their own zine check out ​this great resource from Austin Kleon​.

9. ​Straight from the Heart​ by Jean Chrétien. Another Jean Chrétien book? Yes! The man has four memoirs. But this one is some kind of museum treasure that glows in new light today. It was written in 1985—eight years before Chrétien came to power as Prime Minister. So, wait, a head of state memoir written before being head of state? Arm of state? Leg of state? Kind of, yeah. But let's remember Jean Chrétien was politically cooking by then and had been for a few decades. He was a Member of Parliament under Lester P. Pearson when they ​made the Canadian flag​ in 1967. (Do my top 3 books in the photo above look sort of Canadian-flaggy to you? It’s the little things.) Then, as he recounts here, he had just finished serving as Minister after Minister after Minister under ​Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau​ and even helped ​patriate the Canadian Constitution​ and draft the ​Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms​. Jean Chrétien tells us his story of being born the 18th of 19th children (“In those days God decided how many kids people had”) in ​Shawinigan Falls, Quebec​, a blue-collar French-speaking paper mill town on ​the river​. “We lived in a brick house with a larger garden in which my mother grew vegetables, strawberries, rhubarb...” He drops occasional nuggets of early wisdom like on page 67 when he intones, “The public is moved by mood more than logic, by instinct more than reason” and recounts Canadian history with his knack for simile and metaphor around even tense issues. Like Trudeau’s famous invocation in 1973 of the ​War Measures Act​ after a Canadian politician was slain by the ​FLQ​, Chrétien writes: “We had a hell of a dilemma. Since there was no law that covered precisely this type of national emergency we were left with the terrible-sounding and extensive War Measures Act. I used to describe the dilemma this way: you want to transport a refrigerator, and you only have a bicycle and a van. You won’t get very far on a bicycle, but using a big van for such a little project will look silly.” (Btw, I was somewhat fascinated to learn that the way Trudeau disarmed the FLQ by “allowing the FLQ manifesto to be read on television and letting the terrorists leave for Cuba” which, according to Chrétien, “destroyed political blackmail for a long time in Canada, because Trudeau did not bend farther.) His examination of the Trudeau years is fascinating from “​Trudeaumania​,” a Canadian cultural phenomenon people still discuss, but, according to Chrétien, four years later “no one remembered that. The people only saw the downturn in the economy and the flashy guy with the long hair and a beautiful young wife, and the intellectuals turned on him.” What next? Out forever? Nope! He wins a majority, then another, then another, and goes on to be Prime Minister for over FIFTEEN years! When you hit 91 years old your life is full of history and this book is a great place to start. You can also (of course) ​check out the wondrous speech​ Chrétien made earlier this year and (of course!) ​my upcoming podcast​ with him which will appear on the exact minute of the ​Buck Moon​.

10. There is no 10! Just our regular loot bag of links. First up, I made a podcast on ‘​5 Beach Books to Stretch Your Mind​.’ I go deep explaining them differently than usual (and four of them aren’t in this list) so check it out if you’re looking for a great summer read. What else? Tyrese Haliburton’s ​inspiring post after tearing his Achilles​ at the end of the NBA Finals. Brilliant Balaji reminding us ​AI doesn’t do end-to-end​. Of course preceded by Sam Altman’s blog post on ‘​The Gentle Singularity​’ (and ​Claude’s 1-sentence summary of it​). Nick Cave answers the question, “​Are you a natalist?​” Ken Jennings riffs on how ​Jeopardy! could “save our republic.”​ Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Carol Cadwalladr (who exposed Facebook/Cambridge Analytics) on “​the dark lord of Silicon Valley​.” Cal Newport asks if we’re ​too concerned about social media​. And you know you're Canadian ​if you're salivating right now​.

Remember: You are what you eat. And you are what you read. Keep turning that page ... and I'll talk to you soon.

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