Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - May 2026

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As always just reply anytime to send me a letter. Here are a few:

Hi Neil,
I’ve been enjoying your emails for many years, and some of your books as well. Your message resonates with me.
In this email that urges to delete IG (which I agree with) I can’t help but wonder how Twitter is any different.
Thanks and all the best,
Esther
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Hi Esther!

Argh, yeah, just different in that I’m more addicted? I don’t keep either app on my phone but still sometimes compulsively log in from my laptop. I try and fully log out or ask Leslie to change my password!

Happy Saturday Neil!
It is your grade 10 Math Teacher... Mrs Hill : )
Just like you giving the parenting book to those having babies we as a family had a favourite COOKBOOK...it was Company’s Coming Jean Pare CROCKPOT book! While our kids were growing up we used to rate each recipe and work out the average score in our heads and I would record it on the page. As a busy family we enjoyed OVER 50 recipes from the book. And funny... I am gifting one to a young man (along with a crockpot) as he moves into his own place! Yours in Mathematical fun, Mrs Hill
PS... Leslie has wonderful taste in books! You have found a great soul mate!

Mrs. Hill!

Wow, what a joy.

Mrs. Hill was the best math teacher.

To learn equations she’d take us outside to the parking lot and march us around saying them — memorizing them!

Mathematical fun, indeed. I’ll check out the crock-pot book with thanks. And love the ‘average family score’ LOL ... going to start doing that!

Hi Neil,
I have already put a hold at the library for ‘The Power of Beliefs’. I have started your read aloud recommendations with my son. He enjoyed ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’ and ‘The Twits’! Dahl’s highly binary good vs evil landscapes do well with my kid who loves commenting on “bad guys” and “good guys” in all media he consumes. We will see how our conversations evolve around the nuance that sometimes good/evil is not a clear dichotomy. I wanted to recommend a novel I just finished — ‘The Raven Scholar’ by Antonia Hodgson. It was a finalist for many awards, including the Hugo. It was intimidating to pick up from the library (643 pages is beyond my usual), but in that heft is an elaborate, fast-paced fantasy narrative with characters that surprise you. I know you enjoyed ‘Dune’ [11/25], I would recommend this book to people who enjoyed that novel. Up next for me is ‘Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids Sports—and Why It Matters’ by Linda Flanagan. I’ll blink and my son who is almost 4 will be in school and then maybe in sports if he wants to….I don’t want to be the crazy mom in the stands!
Take care
Mel

Thanks, Mel! Such kind reflections and recos. Two more books to add to my list! I have been banned by my kids from screaming from the stands at their sports, btw. I always say I’m just yelling compliments! But even that was a bit too much... :)

Okay!

Now!

Let’s get to the books!

Neil

1. Go Gentle by Maria Semple (b.1964). About 20 years ago I was living with my parents after college and on weeknights I'd get together with my old friends who either hadn’t left town or had moved back like me. We would meet at my friend H’s basement apartment in Oshawa, unwrap meatball with double cheese Quiznos subs (nobody had heard of calories or cared about them), and then slide in a DVD of ‘Arrested Development’, by far the funniest, fastest-paced show we had ever seen. Popping characters! Braided plotlines! Family drama with cheek, pop, and drips of wisdom. I would have never imagined twenty years later that one of the show’s head writers—the incredible Maria Semple!—would become a favorite novelist today. I’m so grateful Maria aimed her mighty writing talents toward books. After chatting about Maria with Elan Mastai (‘All Our Wrong Todays’, 04/17), I read and loved ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette?’—#2 in my Best Of 2018!—and now I’ve just read Maria’s new book and fallen in love again. Several days in a row I read ‘Go Gentle’ into the wee hours, fell asleep with the book on top of me, then woke up and immediately started reading again. A book magnet! A fast-paced comic storyline wrapped around big thoughts on love, Stoicism, and a uniquely fresh tying-together of the two. Adora Hazzard (what a name!) is a middle-aged divorcée who has embraced Stoicism and been hired to teach it to the children of a super wealthy family. And then: there is an art heist! And a romance! And the challenges of abandoning her philosophy. Now, heads up: you might get disoriented reading this book. I did! Multiple times. But embrace the feeling. You are in steady hands. Let the novel endlessly fold open into the most exquisite origami. Tight, funny phrases pop throughout like “the conductor’s baldpate appearing to ringing applause” or Adora's daughter delivering “an eye roll so extravagant it could have thrown out her back” or when Adora herself “tripped the light fantastic across Fifth Avenue.” Twists, turns, endless throwaway lines on love just “... walk around naked in front of each other, gloriously at ease” throughout. Plus, Stoicism! Maria is a practicing Stoic—listen to her wonderful chat w/ Ryan Holiday on The Daily Stoic—and if you enjoyed books like ‘The Art of Living’ by Epictetus (12/16) or ‘Letters From A Stoic’ by Seneca (05/21), you’ll be happy to know endless lines from them are weaved in, too. A comic masterwork I highly recommend.

2. 101 Letters to a Prime Minister by Yann Martel (b.1963) Tomorrow, at precisely 4:45am, the single hand on my Morley Moon Clock will be aimed at the moon at its very fullest. And that’s exactly when Chapter 162 of 3 Books will drop, featuring my latest guest and one of Canada’s most distinctive literary voices, Mr. Yann (rhymes with ‘Juan’) Martel. The eminent Saskatooner is currently globetrotting in support of his new bestseller ‘Son Of Nobody’— a unique read full of pages that are split in half … the top halves a rediscovered ancient epic and the bottoms a set of footnotes telling the narrator’s life story. I was intrigued when I read Yann’s precisely-100-word bio on the delightfully rubbery-smooth jacket and noticed a full 34% of the words were dedicated to a book I’d never heard of:

Even ‘Life Of Pi’ only clocked in at 27%! What was this book!? Well, I bought it and discovered from 2007 to 2011 Yann mailed Canada’s then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper a book every two weeks along with a letter on why he should read it. “Many books, many letters, one essential question hovering throughout: What sort of mind, nourished by what, do we want our leaders to have?” The project began after Yann was invited to Canadian Parliament during the fiftieth anniversary of the Canadian Council for the Arts. During an extremely short recognition of all the artists in attendance, Yann noticed the Prime Minister didn’t acknowledge or even look at any of them. “Who is this man? What makes him tick? I asked myself. … There must be occasions when his thinking goes from the instrumental—how do I do this? how do I get that?—to the fundamental—why this? why that?” Yann recounts that Stephen Harper never breathed a word about what he reads except once, during the 2004 election cycle, saying his favorite book was the Guinness Book of World Records. Well, maybe that’s good! Because if Harper had thoroughly acknowledged his reading habits, Yann likely wouldn’t have spent four years mailing letters, mailing books, and putting together this gem. I love insane lists of curated books! There are hundreds of millions of books. And I deeply believe that in an era of infinite choice the value of human curation skyrockets!. To date, I’ve written 115 issues of this book club—basically every book I’ve read since 2016!—and on The Top 1000 I’m chipping away on the ‘1000 most formative books in the world,’ which I'm planning to finish up on April 26, 2040. I love this book! The books Yann recommends are literary but varied and the letters are short—2-3 pages each—with Yann’s commentary and overviews. He ranges from ‘Charlotte’s Web’ by E.B. White (02/20) to ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell to ‘Drown’ by Junot Díaz to ‘The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss’ by Carole Mortimer to ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ by Zora Neale Hurston (06/20) to ‘Louis Riel’ by Chester Brown. The sheer unrequited energy here is astounding. Harper never wrote back! But, who cares: To me this feels like you’re in Saskatoon and just opened the door of a little bookshop on a quiet side street. A bell rings above the door and a man with graying hair and round glasses looks up from his chair and smiles. Around the room you see 101 well-curated books on the shelves. Take one! Or pause and hold it while looking at the man and he will smile and spend five minutes telling you all about it and why it makes a great read.

3. Pizza Before We Die: An Eyewitness Account in Gaza by Hassan Kanafani (with Yasuko Thanh). Last month I had fun setting up some “Niece and Nephew Days”. I see my six nieces and nephews at birthday parties and family get-togethers but almost never 1-on-1, so I emailed their parents asking who was up for skipping a half day of school to hang out. This led to me picking up my 7-year-old niece Iya at lunch, heading to a local branch of the Toronto Public Library to read a pile of ‘Elephant and Piggies’, going out for perogies and chicken schnitzel, getting ice cream, going birdwatching in the drizzly rain (she ID’d her first Downy Woodpecker!), and then walking over to ‘Another Story Bookshop’ where we sat on little stools reading books for the rest of the afternoon. The afternoon felt … normal. Walking around … in clothes. Buying and eating … food. The invisible blanket of safety. When we went to the front of the store to pay, I noticed a display on the counter. ‘Pizza Before We Die’? “It’s new,” the bookseller told me. “We just helped launch it.” She explained how a Canadian author found a series of Reddit posts by Hassan Kanafani who is in Gaza today and worked with Arsenal Pulp Press to shape the posts into a book. “We were trying to bring Hassan in via Zoom to the book launch but…” and then she paused, smiled sadly, and looked away. I picked up the book and got it. The fact this book exists feels like a miracle. Foreign media has been banned from Gaza since 2023, 115 media centres destroyed, 270 (!) journalists killed. From the Introduction: “Gaza has sustained the heaviest aerial bombardment in history: one hundred thousand tons of explosives, equivalent to six Hiroshimas, dropped on an area eighty-five times smaller than Vancouver Island.” What’s the scale of the human devastation? From the Introduction: “The Lancet estimated Gaza’s death toll at 186,000” but “680,000 is the number Ralph Nader entered into the US Congressional Record, based on studies by doctors and epidemiologists that take into account deaths from disease, trauma, lack of clean water, lack of medicine, lack of food, and lack of shelter.” What’s the real number? We don’t know. We can’t! Nobody’s allowed to count. But those lacks are what you feel while reading. From Page 1 written on December, 2024: “I sit in the modest tent I share with my family, in one of Gaza’s crowded camps in the desert near the beach. The hanging piece of fabric separating me from my nearest neighbours barely conceals the view, let alone sound. Everyone can hear everyone else; there is no privacy at all. My neighbours stare at their empty table, which used to hold simple meals for their children. But today, there is no bread. The empty flour shelf stands as a silent witness to their long days of struggle.” From Page 43 from January 2025: “The first thing the survivors will notice is the vastness of their field of vision. Nothing obstructs the view—no houses, no trees. Just destruction, destruction, destruction. Massive expanses of rubble in every corner: thousands of tons of stones, shattered windows, wooden doors, glass, rebar, wallpaper, doorsteps, kitchen counter, refrigerators, washing machines, gas ovens, kitchen cabinets, utensils, bathroom fixtures, books, pens, clothes, children’s toys, all fused together in a surreal collage of devastation never before witnessed.” The book paints portraits like this—images you can’t shake—then zooms down to the people living in Gaza and their thoughts and worries and pains. From Page 45: “… individuals will become disabled, not war heroes in society’s eyes. A man will think twice before marrying his daughter to a young man who has lost his leg in the war. A young woman will hesitate a thousand times before exchanging glances with a man without arms. Most of these lives will fade away under the weight of pity, and people will almost forget why they were injured in the first place.” Hassan writes about devastating life in Gaza right now while showcasing little moments of bizarre humanity—like a woman searching for her home after an explosion or a man getting picked up by a taxi driver who had his own dead child wrapped in bandages in the back seat. The title of the book comes from the author overhearing two little girls talking about wanting to eat pizza before they die. After I dropped Iya off at home, I kept reading this book and was just left thinking about how lucky we are and how horrifying the state of life is around the world for so many today. A book to bear witness.

4. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (b.1956). I wrote a blog post this month about how I couldn’t get myself to sleep until I woke up, went to my basement, pulled out this book, and read ‘You Can’t Kill The Rooster’ by David Sedaris. My friend Shiv told me years ago she uses the pacing, comedy, and lulling rhythm of David’s writing to help fall asleep and I’ve followed her advice for years. This is David’s top-selling book of all time and a good place to start if you don’t know his stuff! Pair with my podcast with David in the back seat of his limo cruising around Toronto.

5. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (b.1986). And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick, a book read and reviewed by my wife Leslie. (Full list of Leslie’s Picks right here!). Over to you, Les: “‘The Correspondent’ is a touching look into a woman’s life through her correspondence. A collection of letters and emails with incredible voice and honesty, to and from her best friend, her brother, her neighbours, her children—that together paint the picture of her life. It made me reflect on how each of our lives is dimensional, bittersweet, full of ups and downs, accomplishments, griefs, regrets, and joy. And it made me wonder how my life would be reflected through the (not so many letters but) many emails, texts, and voice notes I share with my dearest friends and family. A heartfelt look at one woman’s life with themes of healing, redemption, and forgiveness that was a welcome reflection on how we live our lives and process them.”

6. A Little More Social: How Small Choices Created Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection by Nicholas Epley (b.1974). Nick states the main point of this wonderfully well-researched book in the Preface: “… Sociality is a need on par with eating and sleeping … it’s likely to be far more important for your happiness than even money.” We know being social is important! Number one driver of human happiness. Phone a friend! Talk to strangers! So why do we sit silently together on trains and planes with everyone entombed in their own echo chamber and social media feeds? Well, it’s a bit confusing at first, but this book reveals the answer: the only thing we fear more than a bad outcome … is an uncertain one. One of many fascinating studies here shows people will pay less money for the chance to win a $50-100 gift card … than a $50 one. What? Yes! We hate uncertainty! We don’t want to try things where we don’t know what’ll happen. Conversations with strangers? That’s uncertain! We think it’ll go horribly wrong. In his talks, Nick asks people to pair up and ask each other two questions: “What are you most grateful for in your life?” and “Can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person?” Sounds tough! People do not think this will go well …. yet it does! Check out this graph from Page 51:

In general, our expectations around being proactively social are dead wrong. This graph comes from Page 69:

What sounds like a perhaps-obvious takeaway is given fresh life and energy with new research from University of Chicago professor and beaming beacon of kindness Nick Epley. This is a book to help push you, bit by bit, to being (yes) a little more social and a lot more happy.

7. The Onion newspaper. Now back in print! What began in 1988 back in Wisconsin and then turned into the regular “every Wednesday” publication for 30 years online (!) at www.theonion.com has now emerged back as an actual newspaper-newspaper. Mailed to your house! When my friend Austin Kleon (who has a new book!) mentioned recently that he’s started subscribing to the The Onion’s print edition, I immediately wanted in on the action. It’s $99 a year and every month I get a dense 24-page full-colour paper mailed to my house serving as a roaring commentary on our world today. In News: “Palantir Acquires Pentagon For $800 Billion”, in Sports: “Nation Decides Baseball Too Fast Now”, and in Real Estate a listing for a home “Only 11 Hours From The Beach” (“With this practically coastal retreat, breathtaking ocean breezes and the soothing sound of waves are only a day-long car ride and a few state lines away, depending on traffic.”) I had hopes of leaving it lying around for my kids but, uh ... it’s still very NSFW. Maybe in a few years. You can get a subscription here.

8. The Bed Of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Second Edition) (b. 1960) A dense book of aphorisms from the witty economist and author of ‘The Black Swan’ (04/21) with the underlying assumption that “So many things become easy to understand when you skip the explanations.” Too true! Wisdom, clichés—sometimes they just bop you on the head. In the “Notice” before the book begins, Taleb recommends “reading no more than four aphorisms in one sitting. It is also preferable to select these randomly.” Okay! That makes this a wonderful addition to Neil’s Enlightened Bathroom Reading List. This book is full of gems like this from Page 32: “‘Wealthy’ is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use instead the subtractive measure ‘unwealth’, that is, the difference, at any point in time, between what you have and what you would like to have.” I love that! Or from Page 67: “The exponential information age is like a verbally incontinent person: he talks more and more as fewer and fewer people listen.” Who relates to that? Or from Page 76: “The tragedy is that much of what you think is random is in your control and, what’s worse, the opposite.” Many of these one-liners will roll around your brain for days. This is the second edition published in 2016 (updating the 2010 original) and it’s a wonderful pocket book of wisdom from a huge mind.

9. There is no nine! Just our regular loot bag of links. Who we spend time with as we age. On reading books: Claude knows. One year into Dallas's cell phone bans. How many of Dan Go’s 7 exercises to 'reverse aging' can you do? Maria Popova on ‘the secret behind 20 years of daily writing’. Rich Roll is doing wonderful new solo podcasts. Pema Chödrön on Ezra Klein. Clear 30 is an app to help people take a 30-day cannabis break. Ever heard of “rich face”? Good news: ‘The A.I. Job Apocalypse (Probably) Won’t Happen’. My favorite pages from 'The Power of Beliefs'. The right kind of ambition. And I love Alex’s floor plan for his dream house!

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