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Hey everyone,
The percentage of Americans who read for pleasure is at its lowest level ... ever. There’s a giant study called The American Time Use Survey which looks at 26,000 Americans and they found that over a 15 year period pleasure-reading was down 29-40%. (They call it "29% for women and 40% for men" but it feels archaic to think gender and reading are related.) Gallup also found the number of people who do not read a single book in a year has tripled from the late 70s to the latest data a few years ago -- now a full 57% of Americans don’t read a single book a year. I mean: How could we when we’re spending more than five hours a day on our phones?
I guess I’m just in a bit of a “book activist” mood this month but I wanted to lay that on the line and start talking more about the importance of reading: as community-connector, empathy-builder, and compassion-fountainhead. “Books are magic,” Kevin the Bookseller told us back in Chapter 44. And he’s right. I want to get better at being a book evangelist.
Also, I'll now pause to offer the somewhat-obligatory virtual back-pat to you for taking your education seriously, for planting seeds in your inner garden, and for, you know, hanging out with me each month to talk about books.
What are some ways we can better coalesce, celebrate, and share the joy and rewards of reading? Or: Is there a book-loving community you're a part of that you recommend? Just reply and let me know.
And now, as we’ve done for 68 straight months, let’s get to the books...
Neil
1. Exactly What To Say: The Magic Words for Influence and Impactby Phil M. Jones. (L/I/A) I am a bit wary of slim business books with clickbaity titles (says the guy who wrote The Happiness Equation, I know). But this book delivers. I would even say it’s a must-read if your job involves sales of any kind. (Dan Pink would say that would be all of us.) Phil is a master linguist, negotiator, and influencer. Influencer in that original "debate-winner” sense not the current “tanning my oily chiseled abs by the beach drinking a disgusting sugary drink you should all buy so they re-up my contract” sense. He opens the book by saying: “The worst time to think about the thing you are going to say is in the moment you are saying it. This book prepares you for nearly every known eventuality and provides you with a fair advantage in almost every conversation.” Intrigued? He spends 2-4 pages going deep on 23 powerful phrases you can drop into conversation. “I’m not sure if it’s for you”, “I bet you’re a bit like me…”, and even simple-sounding phrase swaps like powerfully shifting “Do you have any questions?” to “What questions do you have?”. If you're one of the 30 million people who read How To Win Friends And Influence People, this book might function as an ultra-concentrated distant cousin. I guess there's a reason for the 10,700 reviews on Audible. Highly recommended.
2. How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asiaby Mohsin Hamid. (L/I/A) I think Mohsin Hamid is one of the most talented novelists alive. And his zig-zaggy path to, uh, novelizing is fascinating in and of itself: Born in Pakistan, emigrated to California age 3 so dad could do Stanford PhD, whips back to Pakistan age 9 with a sharp severing of all American friendships, heads back to US at age 18 to attend Princeton (where he takes a formative writing class from Toni Morrison who helped shape his first novel), and then graduates into a 20-year business trajectory (!) at McKinsey followed by executive brand management roles ... all of which he does while writing three massively award-winning novels on the side: Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and How To Get Filthy Rich Is Rising Asia(2013). That doesn't include Exit West (2017) which is probably his most popular. Okay, so let's back up to this book: It's written in second person and tells a gripping tale of you – a poor boy from a poor family in a poor unnamed country – on your rise to riches. I have to put this book in my top ten novels of all time. Here’s Page 1. Let's see if it hooks you like it did for me: “Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author. This is true of the whole self-help genre. It’s true of how-to books, for example. And it’s true of personal improvement books, too. Some might even say it’s true of religion books. But some others might say that those who say that should be pinned to the ground and bled dry with the slow slice of a blade across their throats. So it’s wisest simply to note a divergence of views on that subcategory and move swiftly on. // None of the foregoing means self-help books are useless. On the contrary, they can be useful indeed. But it does mean that the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one. And slippery can be good. Slippery can be pleasurable. Slippery can provide access to what would chafe if entered dry. // This book is a self-help book. Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia. And to do that it has to find you, huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother’s cot one cold, dewy morning…” Pretty good, right? That's just the first page. Highly recommended.
4.Dinner At The Homesick Restaurantby Anne Tyler. (L/I/A) I have never read a novel quite like this before. Let’s see: It’s about … nothing. In that Seinfeld sense of endlessly twisting plotlines about the minutiae of four people’s lives nothing. Less jazz riffs, less laugh tracks, more melancholy, more heart-scratching. There is a deep sadness between the covers of this book which tells the story of a single mother in Baltimore seventy years ago who simply never tells her children their father left them. What happens to this family from there? Well, that, my friends, is what you pay your ticket for. This is a deeply feeling book with remarkably vivid characters and incredible detail all offered through a how-does-she-do-it style of almost shockingly accessible prose. This book offer a three-dimensional hologram of a family you’ll feel like you are living beside … and I’d be interested to see if you miss them or glad to lose them by the end. Five stars. (Thank you to 3 Booker Cindy Sherrick who phoned me at 1-833-READ-A-LOT to recommend I invite Superhero Librarian Nancy Pearl onto the show. Well, I did, and Nancy asked me to read this first. Conversion drops on the Strawberry Moon.)
5.Glork Patrol Takes a Bathby James Kochalka. (L/I/A) James Kochalka (ka-chall-ka) may be the single greatest cartoonist most people have ... never heard of? He turned 55 this week and has been making indie comics and punk rock since he was a teenager. This book is a wild Being John Malkovich-like head-twisting waterslide of a book for the 4-8 set. It tells the jumpy story of a space-based family that skewers our own sensibilities and values as it celebrates creativity, storytelling, and love. I personally would expand that age range from 4-8 to something more like 2-100. I should give fair warning that Leslie didn’t like this book so I'll offer this screen: If you like, let’s see, three or more of theeeeeese... then you'll like this book: Super Mario Brothers 3, early Coen Brothers movies, Jason Shiga books, The Night Riders (one of my Best of 2019!), Rushmore, or Everything, Everywhere All At Once. Love this book, even. I did. A truly wonderful piece of art.
6. Pereira Maintainsby Antonio Tabucchi. (L/I/A) I would never have heard of this book if Mohsin Hamid hadn’t just picked it as one of his three most formative. We’re working on a 3 Books chapter to release on the Sturgeon Moon and, of course, that means I gotta spend a few moons reading his formative books. (I’ll save the other two as a surprise for the show.) Thin, sparse, slow, with a deeply beating heart, this novel functions as a precise self-consciousness awakening of an elderly Portuguese widow (who talks to a photo of his dead wife every morning) who runs a small irrelevant culture section in a local Lisbon newspaper ... and who eventually learns that he really does have power and really does need to use it if he wants to help challenge the totalitarian regime. Takes place during the 40-year reign of Portuguese dictator António Salazar. Warning: Despite the 150-ish pages, the book is slow. That'll either annoy your or help you catch a vibe that helps you slow down.
7. A Kid's Book About School Shootingsby Crystal Woodman Miller. (L) And now this months Leslie’s Pick, a book personally hand-chosen by my wonderful partner: “This is a book every parent wishes they never had to read to their child. It's available online for free - download here. A Kids Company About is a place to “find books, podcasts, and apps to help spark important conversations” about things like mental health, death, war, poverty, racism, and…school shootings. Written for an adult and child (or teenager) to read together. If your child is asking about the recent school shootings (being young and in Canada ours are not) this book may be helpful. The focus is on validating emotions the child may be having, reassuring them that school shootings are very rare, and explaining that being prepared by having lockdown drills is part of an effort to keep them safe. I would say this book is best for children 8 and up but could be used as young as 5 or 6 if the child is worrying about school shootings. There is room for conversation between the adult and child about the child’s questions and suggestions on what action kids can take but probably not enough explaining why school shootings happen (e.g., that owning a gun is allowed in the United States and that if people are hurting, they are hurting, etc.) If you need inspiration for conversations that go along with this book, I made up the acronym CHATS when having compassionate and courageous conversations with children. C - Child-led - Let the child’s questions guide the conversation, H - Human - You don’t have to say the perfect thing, just be human and real with your child, A - An Invitation - See each small question by your child as an invitation to connect deeply and an opportunity to show them they can come to you about anything, T - Tools - Use books, websites, toys, art, laughter and role play, S - Support - (perhaps most importantly) Get support for YOU so you can be there for them”
8. WHAT IT ISby Lynda Barry. (L/I/A) I was lucky to have lunch with Austin Kleon last week at Mi Madre’s in Austin, Texas. Our server Veronica told us her parents started the restaurant back in 1990 and that they’re slowly making it through the pandemic. Over nachos, guacamole, and enchiladas resting on a teal-painted metal table, with a garden in a claw-foot navy-blue bathtub beside us, while swatting at screechy Great-tailed Grackles, Austin told me how this book shaped his life. Easy to see from this viewpoint! A deeply heart-forward collage artist-slash-memoirist-slash-nearly-unclassifiable artist? Could be either of them! I strongly recommend this book for artists of all stripes – and, maybe especially those seeking to inch their art closer to the drawing, illustration, or visual side of things. An entirely hand-drawn feast that will take time to slip into the rhythm of – this is a penetrating The War Of Art-cousin book for those more visually led.
9.Read Like An Artistby Austin Kleon. Speaking of Austin, he passed me a copy of these limited edition zines he made in support of indie bookstores last month. Thankfully for all of us he’s posted the whole thing online here. I love his bibliomania. His is a deeply book-loving community right there. You can follow that link to sign up for his Substack or newsletter, too.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Hope you’re doing well.
I had a blast this month interviewing Daniels. Catching artists in the middle of a shooting-star moment feels very lucky. We sat down just after their movie Everything, Everywhere All At Once had just been named the top-ranked film of the past decade on Rotten Tomatoes … but before the movie was widely released. A few books below comes from them and you can listen to our 3 Books conversation on Apple, Spotify, or right on the site.
Speaking of 3 Books, we hit Chapter 100 this month. I’m proud that in this endlessly screaming world, our award-winning podcast remains ad-free, sponsor-free, commercial-free, and interruption-free. Been shaking up the Boggle board a bit with a new logo, new intro, and other surprises. Let me know what you think anytime by calling me at 1-833-READ-A-LOT.
Now: Are pandemic fogs lifted where you live? Or are you in an eleventh wave with new mask mandates? For 753 days in a row I’ve shared an awesome thing every day through the pandemic. I debated stopping now but we’re too close to call it quits. 247 days to go! If you want one every day in your inbox just click here. (Or join 100,000 people who get it on Facebook if you prefer.)
As echo chambers deepen and reality starts wobbling, let’s keep using this monthly conversation about books as a little air bubble of space to stay connected -- heart-to-heart, human-to-human. I’m reading right beside you and, of course, as always, just reply anytime with a comment, question, or suggestion.
And now onto the books…
Neil
1. Sex At Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationshipsby Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. (L/I/A) When Daniels picked this book I hadn’t heard of it despite it being in its fortieth printing with over 30,000 reviews across Amazon and GoodReads. “Hmmm,” I thought, “I wonder why it has a couple different covers … and a couple different subtitles” but before I could think on that I peeled open the cover and got punched in the nose by the Kahlil Gibran epigraph: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.” That line had stayed with me since The Prophet and it sort of did that epigraphy thing of piquing interest in some yet-to-be-determined way. From there the book takes off like a rocket with sharp, whip-smart prose zooming you through an astounding millions-of-years-evolutionary-history of human sexuality. Nothing is off limits! Like Daniels themselves, the book delights in tackling taboos and challenging topics head-on while presumably knowing they’ll make a few mistakes along the way but hey? Is there any other way to really live? Zesty. There’s my one-word review. This book is zesty. You can almost hear the authors gleefully spiking volleyballs into Charles Darwin’s and Jane Goodall’s foreheads while bouncing between topics like the type of porn we watch to our species’ relative penis size and, of course, why those things matter. Sure, some chapters are skippable as they have a tendency to go on massive veering asides (pot, kettle, I know) and, I will say, like a multi-million year evolutionary history of anything, there are undoubtedly plenty of things wrong. I just think this isn’t the type of book to read with the brakes on. Rather, go all-in on the ride and then pause to stew, process, and discuss. Stew, process, and discuss, you will! Pairs well with Mating in Captivity and paperback features a great Q&A with columnist Dan Savage, too.
2 & 3. Calvin and Hobbes and It’s A Magical Worldby Bill Watterson. (L/I/A & L/I/A) I got an email from 3 Booker Bo Boswell from Nashville, Tennessee mid-pandemic where he shared that reading Calvin and Hobbes was calming and grounding for him. I wouldn’t have thought of it naturally but … yeah. There’s something deeply soul-fueling about reading Calvin and Hobbes, especially if you grew up in the strip’s Beatles-like ten-year run from 1985-1995. Daniels gave me a really fun way to revisit it, too: Read the very first Calvin and Hobbes book (published in 1987) and the very last one (published in 1996). Skip treasuries, box-sets, and remixes! Start at the beginning and end at the end. How novel in The Era of The Algorithmic Playlist. When you do it this way the amount of character, format, and theme growth is bewildering – transmogrifying, even – as the strip tackles many social issues long before they became “labeled things” – nature deficit disorder, surveillance capitalism, unschooling, and it goes on. Takeaways for artists: We can change more than we think, there are always more and less constraints than the surface reveals, and saying what you want to say the way you want to say it just never goes out of style. Btw: What’s Bill Watterson up to these days? Oil painting, apparently. That’s what he said in a 2014 interview in this book where he (also) denied being a recluse. But … isn’t that just what a recluse who wants to be left alone would say? Keep inspiring us, Bill!
4. Upstream: Selected Essaysby Mary Oliver. (L/I/A) I bumped into this book of essays in the bookstore and felt like I found some hidden gem. “Mary Oliver has essays!?” She’s one of the most prominent poets of all time and I have shared some of her poems, like "Wild Geese", in my bi-weekly Neil.blog emails. Leslie even keeps a copy of Devotions beside the bed. But: I am sorry to say I found the book … surprisingly unfulfilling. Did you follow Michael Jordan’s baseball career? I did. It was a huge story! Here comes the greatest basketball player to make his mark on baseball. And? Swing and a miss. I know the world always wants us to stay in our lanes so I applaud trying new things but here the essays seemed to sort of linger on their subjects both too long and too lightly at the same time. The book felt like somebody had done a Google search for all Mary Oliver writing over 500 words and then just copied and pasted it all into one document. Maybe I’m being too harsh. She does have a deep gift for dropping incredible pearls of wisdom. Three lines I underlined were: “Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion.”, “Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else?”, and “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” I'll give it a solid two and a half stars.
5.After Babel: How Social Media Dissolved The Mortar Of Society And Made America Stupidby Jonathan Haidt. Having an actual paper magazine subscription has became an act of protest because you’re voting for so many things suddenly in the minority: print over digital, curation over endlessness, investigative journalism over talking airheads. I’ll tell you this: My annual subscription to The Atlantic paid for itself in one fell swoop with this rubber-mallet-to-the-forehead 8000-word essay of essays by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt is the NYU professor and prominent TED Talker behind The Righteous Mind and The Coddling Of The American Mind and this article reads like the seed kernel of his next big cob of a book. Do you feel your anxiety spiking on social media? Can you just not stop doomscrolling even though you know it’s not good for you? This article takes us on a detailed 10-year history of social media with deep research, studies, and references all building towards its boil: “If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse.” Bit bold? Sure, but it’s hard to argue against what he puts forward here. Haidt manages to stay on the razor-thin center line – puling off that South Park move of trashing everyone equally – and it’s almost impossible to read this piece and not feel like big changes need to be made right now. What changes? Raising the age of children’s access to social media from 13 (set in 1998!) to at least 16 (which still feels early given spiking anxiety and depression rates), modifying ‘Share’ functions on Facebook to require “copying and pasting” as an extra step which is very content-neutral but forces thinking-pauses (much like Twitter added a little “Do you want to read this first?” pop-up when you retweet an article now), and, more broadly, asking the tech giants to, you know, maybe verify their users are actually users. Banks do it, insurance companies do it, but tech companies? Nope! Go ahead bot, troll, algorithm, start up hundreds of millions of accounts that swerve the public discourse and understanding of what’s real. I say read this article, pause and then copy-paste-and-share this article. Jon Haidt is doing critically important work for our world. May his voice be amplified! (PS. I’m delighted to share that he will be our guest on 3 Books shortly.)
6.Time To Recharge, Harper!by Kelly Leigh Miller. (L/I/A) Harper is a robot who does not like to charge! Because charging is a waste of time! Harper is very busy and has so many things to do and he can’t do anything while charging! (“Sleep is boring, being awake is fun” Tim Urban) Harper starts getting a low battery and insists on staying awake despite feeding the canvas and painting the fish. Harper keeps making mistakes until he finally crashes. My wife Leslie says this book is potentially about me and the kids have started saying “Time to Recharge, daddy!” Works pretty well. Get this for anyone in your life who has trouble turning off.
7. The Wonder Weeks: A Stress-Free Guide to Your Baby’s Behaviorby Hetty van de Rijt and Frans X. Plooij. (L/I/A) When one of our kids goes through a prolonged period of crankiness, clinginess, or fussiness Leslie and I always say to each other “Oh, it’s a leap.” Somehow that phrase together with its immediate follow-up -- “Yeah, their brain is growing” -- helps frustration walls crumble and empathy walls build back up. How can you be upset with someone whose brain is growing? (Doesn’t always work / everyone is human, etc.) But we got the phrase from an app called Wonder Weeks that Leslie downloaded years ago. The app helpfully / eerily seemed to predict – almost to the exact day – when our little ones would be going through periods of ‘independence regression’. How is that possible? Well, fifty years ago Frans and Hetty finished up their PhDs in educational psychology, physical anthropology, and behavioral biology and went to hang out with Jane Goodall in Tanzania. After a couple years they had so much data on baby chimps and their mothers that they began researching if the same ‘leaps’ they observed occurred in humans. Spoiler Alert: They did! The book (and app) chronicles each leap – the behavior that happens during and after – and what types of activities may be fun or helpful to try during the period. Originally came out in Dutch in 1992 and is now in its sixth edition in English. One watchout: I disagree with the phrase “stress-free” in the subtitle. The risk of the book is that it brings out the “gold star on their homework” side of parents and sort of trades in some deep intuitive wisdom for some checklisty could dos and should dos. To be taken as an aid more than anything.
8. Warbler Waveby April Pulley Sayre. (L/I/A) My friend Fred texted me last week asking if my love for birding was “a bit.” I asked him what he meant. “I just don’t know anybody under 70 who actually goes birding,” he replied. No! It’s a not a bit! There’s a reason I started The Next 1000 with #1000 Being suddenly really into birdwatching. It was because I was … suddenly really into birdwatching. Here! Take this pop quiz: If you like 3 or more of these things, I’m pretty sure you’ll love birding: Hiking in forests, puzzles and mental challenges, nature photography, environmentalism and enviro-activism, long walks outdoors, and list-making. How do you get started? Simply three things: 1) Get a pair of binoculars and leave them somewhere handy, 2) Download the totally free Merlin ID app, and 3) Raid the children’s book section of your local library. Why children’s books? Because they’re just so wonderfully colorful and educational and unpretentious. Over fifty species of (mostly) tiny, singing, insect-eating warblers have been migrating from South and Central America up to Canada and the US for millions of years. What time of year? Now! Soon! Get ready! This book taught me a wonderful new word: Zugrunruhe (“ZOO-guhn-roo-uh”) which is migratory restlessness. Can you relate? Like if you keep a warbler in a room with no change in light or temperature they will hop and flutter in the direction of their migration. Unlike geese, warblers aren’t ‘taught’ how to migrate from their parents – they presumably use the earth’s magnetic field or the stars. The book’s poetry is light but the photos are stunning and the info in the back on what’s hurting them (the relatively modern inventions of cell towers, skyscrapers, and outdoor housecats) and how to help them (planting fruit trees, setting up birdbaths, leashing dogs) provide great info.
9. Breakfast of Championsby Kurt Vonnegut. (L/I/A) Meta metaverses, self-and-circular references, breaking the fourth wall, endlessly disorienting sideways jump cuts. TikTok videos? Of course. Piece of early 70s contemporary literature? That too! This is the strangest novel I have come across in a long time. The plot is so hard to follow I had to read the Wikipedia Plot Summary entry three times. Wild, byzantine, X-rated, confusing, strange. If this sounds like your cup of tea, pick up a copy! Based on a very unofficial ranking based on number of Goodreads reviews, this is Vonnegut’s third most popular book after Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle. I have only read this and Slaughterhouse Five (for my chat with Elan Mastai, Executive Producer of This Is Us and author of the wonderful All Our Wrong Todays) and so far … neither did it for me. Did I start with the wrong Vonnegut? I will say I loved and treasure If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? which is just a collection of Vonnegut’s commencement speeches. I also fell in love with his old New Yorker obituary / poem "Enough" which his wonderful trustees were kind enough to let me use in The Happiness Equation in exchange for a donation to some of Kurt’s causes. So: love the man! Still wading through his art.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
I recently hung out with self-described bibliomaniac Doug Miller and a book-loving brew of customers in his stacked-to-ceilings shop in Koreatown. You know those old candy machines where you put in a quarter, spin the metal dial, and a handful of peanut M&Ms rolls out from the giant bin? Well, Doug’s bookshop is the handful and the bin is his 500,000-plus (!) book collection housed in a stack of train cars outside town. Just in case you think your book addiction is hitting new levels! The conversation really filled my soul and if you're looking for some book-lover connection I'd love you to come hang out with us right here.
Also, this month: I’m excited we're hitting Chapter 100 of 3 Books. This little podcast that could really began as an outgrowth of this book club back in 2018. It’s been four years and the train isn't scheduled into the station until Chapter 333 in 2031. I hope we can keep talking about books until then.
Okay, now onto the books!
Neil
1. Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Wholeby Susan Cain. (L/I/A) Susan’s first book Quiet came out nearly a decade ago and has stuck on bestseller lists pretty much since then. Together with her famous TED Talk “The Power of Introverts” Susan gave rising voice, power, and language to a new movement. And now ... she does it again. Susan spent years tackling the ephemeral idea of what it means to hold a bittersweet outlook on life. “Why do I crank Leonard Cohen songs in college?” to “Why do people love sad movies?” to “How do we transcend 'enforced positivity' in some workplaces?” to “Should we try to ‘get over’ grief and impermanence?”, the book is a feast for curiosity junkies as it navigates the world through Susan’s unique lens. Every paragraph feels almost wholly fresh and while the chapters are strung along iteratively you can jump back and forth between ones that may catch your eye without losing place. Although Susan’s books may casually get places in “Business” they’re really almost genre-less – sort of Jon Ronson-buddy-beside-you-on-the-bus-style – and you simply open the book and ride along as she moves from person to person, place to place, study to study to slowly peel open the onion. The book begins with a Bittersweet Quiz where you find out where you sit on the concept of bittersweetness – described as ‘a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy when beholding beauty.’ With our culture careening forward at an increasingly frenetic pace and echo chambers become dizzying it can be easy to lose touch with subtler or heavier emotions we feel inside but don't see reflected in our algorithmic feeds. This book gives shape to so many of the deeper stirrings of the soul. Check out her newly released TED Talk "The hidden power of sad songs and rainy days" for a teaser. I highly recommend this book and hope you'll join Susan and me (virtually!) in a live event celebrating her book with Magic City Books in Tulsa, Oklahoma on April 14th. Every ticket includes a copy of the book and you’ll be supporting a wonderful indie bookstore. Tickets here.)
2. Desperately Seeking B**ksyby Xavier Tapies. (L/I/A) Banksy is arguably the most popular street artist in the world – perhaps with credit to the 2010 documentary, Exit Through The Gift Shop, his outlandish stunts like “Girl with the Red Balloon” getting frame-chewed, or maybe from his viral Instagram account. For relative Banksy amateurs (like me) this is a little reference guide attempting to catalog every Banksy work that still exists – plus many that have since been buffed or painted over. It’s not exhaustive nor unbiased but there are plenty of images you likely haven't seen and it’s nicely cataloged by date, location, and current status with an attempted interpretation of each one.
3. Chirri & Chirra Under the Seaby Kaya Doi with translation by David Boyd. (L/I/A) Back in 2004 this whimsical picture book came out in Japan featuring a “Night Riders-esque” tale of two young Japanese girls on bicycles ringing their bells (“Dring-dring! Dring-dring!”) and riding through a tunnel before suddenly dropping into a mystical underwater journey where they pedal through coral and discover a secret lounge where they sit on conch couches and seashell sofas before enjoying "sea-spray parfait à la conch" and "marine soda jelly topped with pearl cream." Brought to them by a crimson octopus with long eyelashes, blue eyeshadow, and a hotel maid’s outfit on, of course. Now, more than fifteen years later, David Boyd, Assistant Professor of Japanese at University of North Carolina, partnered with Brooklyn-based indie children's book publisher Enchanted Lion Books (treasure trove!) for a magical English translation. Like seeds for fertile imaginations I highly recommend this for all ages. To see the evocative images inside, check out this YT video.
4. No One Belongs Here More Than Youby Miranda July. (L/I/A) Sixteen short stories in two-hundred pages mean these stories come in nicely digestible Alice-Munro-sized nuggets. But while Alice Munro’s stories sort of sail down twisting rivers these ones blast into different dimensions. Paragraphs leap between times and views, a sudden sexual turn surprises, and (if you’re like me) you’ll find yourself flipping back a page or two a lot to sort of re-place yourself inside the story. Deep in each one are rich veins of nearly inarticulatable emotions running underneath. Brené Brown’s new book gives structure to 87 different emotions but if you believe there are thousands and thousands more, well – this is the book for you! A unique stirring happens when you read about (for example) Deb’s sudden relationship with the child of old-college-friend parents (both openly cheating on each other) and how it then morphs into that of second-mom and then three-parent family and then three-parent-family-going-to-therapy. Does it end there? Not even close. I won’t ruin the many surprises left including the shocking finish. This all happens in a dozen pages! Surprises wait behind every corner, sentences are always fascinating (Opening line of the book: “It still counts, even though it happened when he was unconscious.”) There is nothing “hard” about the writing – no big words, I mean -- but the emotional cliffs are very jagged and steep.
6. A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003 – 2020by David Sedaris. (L/I/A) I woke up on June 11, 2018 and knew it immediately: Today was the day! One of the biggest of my interviewing life. I met David Sedaris’s publicist and limo driver in the roundabout of a posh downtown hotel and slipped into the leather backseat and hit record. (You can listen to the moment I pushed record and what happened after.) David invited me to join his interview at the CBC and we ended up carrying on holding mics in the green room and hallways and then back in the car on the way to his book signing. Many times while we spoke he pulled out his famous notebook and jotted down a quote or a phrase. At one point he asked the CBC interviewer and me for our mailing addresses (two weeks later a postcard arrived from Wisconsin) and, honestly, it felt like a connection. So, of course, when I cracked open the next 17 years of David’s diaries I flipped immediately to June 11, 2018, eager to read what I was sure would be at least three pages dedicated to what a prominent dent I’d made on his life. Certainly I’d rattled a few closely-held beliefs ajar, I knew that for sure. So I flip to page 464 and – crickets. In fact his entire Canadian tour was missing. I knew he’d signed books for seven hours in Ottawa the night before, got up early, walked 20,000 steps (master Fitbitter), then flown to Toronto for a day of media before another packed bookstore with a seven-hour line. But the entry before was May 20th: “On the train to Sussex I was struck by how green everything was. At one point I noticed a fellow passenger, a young man in a black coat that fell to the ground. It had a band around the waist that was slightly different texture, and when the guy stood to disembark, I asked him about it. ‘That coat is really something,’ I said. ‘Is it part of a uniform?’, ‘I’m, um, a priest,’ he told me. ‘Right,’ I said.” The next post was June 20th in Albuquerque where he tells the story of a woman in his book-signing line telling him about a pug who ate his own eyeball. “I made all the appropriate noises and facial expressions – horror, delight, horror again – and the woman said, ‘I knew you’d love that story.’ She got that right.” Longer, slower, less rehearsed than his books of essays these are perfectly flip-open-and-flip-through books whenever you want to go somewhere else for a minute with a true master of perception and observation. I'm not anyone uses the phrase X-rated anymore, but just a heads up that a lot entries... are. For more Sedaris's subtle brilliance here are three that aren't: 1) June 17, 2004 in Houston: “The host of last night’s show had problems reading his notes and announced in his introduction that I’d gotten my start with the National Public Rodeo.”, 2) July 17, 2010 in La Bagotiére: “Hugh started proofreading Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk this morning. ‘What are you laughing at?’ I called from the bed. ‘The Migrating Warblers,’ he said. Then I heard nothing. ‘Why aren’t you laughing?’ I called.”, 3) November 17, 2017 in San Diego: “After checking into my hotel, I walked to the harbor front, where I passed a store called America’s Heroes. The men’s T-shirts in the window read ARMY or USMC while the women’s pictured a shapely female silhouette above the words BOOTY CAMP.”
7. What Strange Paradiseby Omar El Akkad. (L/I/A) A child washes up on a foreign shore after his crumbling migrant boat falls into the sea. Told in a wonderfully paceful style of alternating “After” chapters (the day of the child opening his eyes, running away, and seeking safety), with “Before” chapters (departing and the boat ride) before it all culminates in a final chapter simply called “Now.” I went to school with Omar and from days working together on college papers it was easy to see his keen penetrating curiosity and it’s really been remarkable to see how it’s informed his incredible career as an award-winning journalist (covering Guantanamo Bay, the war in Afghanistan, and much more) and now his next career as an award-winning novelist. What Strange Paradise is his second novel and just won the Giller Prize (!) and his debut novel American War won the Oregon Book Award for fiction. Many scenes in this book will move and shake you. Pairs well with the Seven Stories graphic novel Zenobia.
8. All We Want: Building The Life We Cannot Buyby Michael Harris. (L/I/A) “There is an enormous difference between the adulthood that consumer culture promised and the one we inevitably inherit,” Michael writes on Page 127 of this tight 152-page journey exploring how we might write new stories of meaning that include forms of Craft, the Sublime, and Care. Michael is a truly wonderful writer and just hanging out with him and his frequently-cameoing husband Kenny is time well spent. So: how do we build the life we cannot buy? I feel like communities like this are a great place to start. This is a wonderful book mixing memoir, psychologist interviews, and long simmers in the bigger questions. Susan Orlean calls Michael "humane, insightful, and clear-eyed” and I highly recommend his work. I think my path to getting here was reading “I Have Forgotten How To Read” in 2018 The Globe and Mail and then picking up and absolutely falling in love with Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World. (Not quite it but if loneliness is ‘alone and sad’ then solitude is ‘alone and happy.’) and then hanging out with 3 Bookers and Michael in his Vancouver apartment. If you haven’t read Solitude, I might start there and then come this next. And, I think if you like Susan Cain's books, then you'll really like his, too. At minimum All We Want will insert healthy pauses before the next push of the vending machine button depicted on the cover.
9. Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder: Who Cut The Cheese?by Jo Nesbø. (L/I/A) Here is a pick from my seven-year-old son who loves this book: “The doctor is a doctor who invents a lot of stuff but he doesn’t invent really useful things so he’s basically just like an older kid and that’s why he’s neither rich or famous. And his friends are Nilly and Lisa and they’re trying to save the world from a lot of evil moon chameleons who look like baboons and can camouflage to look like anything including people or trees. And the moon chameleons eat intelligent stuff and humans are the most intelligent stuff in the galaxy so you know how some scientists think there are Martians on Mars? There are not! But there used to be! And then the moon chameleons ate all of them. And the book is very funny and about how Nilly and Lisa and the Doctor team up to save the world.” Jo Nesbø is the most popular Norwegian author of all time and, I just discovered, this book is part of a 4-book series that can be apparently be read in any order. For ages 8 to 12 or anyone long-intrigued by the idea of inventing a powder that gives people rocket-launching farts.
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Hey everyone,
Hope you and your family are safe and well and I hope reading may be offering you comfort and connection these days.
I will say my reading has become more jumpy. I was critical of myself when I first started noticing it – I'm addicted to social media! I have officially fractured my attention! – but also maybe ... it's just how I prefer to read. I think many of us are the same and yet we feel guilty saying it. Some books below I started years back and didn't like -- but then picked up years later. Others, especially non-fiction, I read maybe half the chapters and then pop in and out of others to see if I want to spend time inside.
THERE ARE NO RULES TO READING.
That's what I'm saying. Reading offers massive payoffs but also requires a massive time investment. Since reading a big book takes so long it can start feeling like a chore or something you "should" do more. (Hence a title like this goes crazy viral). So let's take a little pause to say: Read whatever makes you love reading and keep reading. Let's remove yet another layer of book shame and book guilt -- "I must read this entire book in order or I am a bad reader" -- and make room to just read what fills us up.
To the pages!
Neil
1. Atlas of the Heartby Brené Brown. (L/I/A) I think this might be Brené Brown’s best book. I don’t say that lightly! It is somehow rich as a dense chocolate cake and light as the whipped cream on top. After a wonderful introduction the book opens up into essentially … a dictionary. Brené and her research team catalogue 87 emotions that you think you know … but would probably benefit from a little private catchup with Brené. Sadness, for example. You know sadness, right? Who doesn't! But Brené colors it in when she says “Sadness and depression are not the same thing” and “Sadness and grief are not the same thing” and then explaining the research shows we enjoy sad movies because “We like to be moved. We like to feel connected to what it means to be human, to be reminded of our inextricable connection to one another. Sadness moves the individual ‘us’ toward the collective ‘us.’" Red underlined 100 emoji, right? Maybe three of them? Brené pulls off this magic trick on much trickier and nuanced emotions, too. On Anguish: “… powerlessness is what makes anguish traumatic. We are unable to change, reverse, or negotiate what has happened.” On Hope: "... We experience hope when we have the ability to set realistic goals ... we are able to figure out how to achieve those goals ... and we have agency..." Peppered with deep research, powerful quotes (“Boredom is your imagination calling to you.” Sherry Turkle) and Brené’s home-cooked Texan wit, this atlas deserves a place on your shelf and, yes, in your hernia -- heart! Heart, I meant heart. You know what I meant. (PS. Leslie and I sat down with Brené last year. Join us on the basement couch.)
2. Beautiful Oopsby Barney Saltzberg. (L/I/A) Leslie or I try to read three books to our kids every night before bed. I pick one, they pick one, everyone's happy. Over time standards for those books have gotten higher. Must be short! No time for Beatrix Potter here, sorry. But must also be good. Kids lose interest, that's trouble. Must be ‘cozy’ enough that they can sleep with it. (For some reason my kids love sleeping with books after we read to them. Sorry, big sharp Winnie-The-Pooh Treasury.) And, yes, in a totally perfect but rarely achieved world, the book might drop a little value-discovering or -reinforcing of some kind. Like I said: tall bar. But even with that tall bar a book that makes it in at least once a week is Beautiful Oops. Leslie used this in her classrooms before we had kids so it’s been “in the rotation” for over ten years. The thick, plastic-coated pages have real-looking rips and stains that are revealed to be the basis of yet another creative idea. “Every spill,” a page begins, before you flip up the spilled paint from the can – “has lots” -- flip up – “and lots” -- flip up -- “of possibilities” – with each flip revealing doodles that continue to render the oops beautiful. Welcome balm for perfectionistic high-achieving tendencies in this increasingly anxious world. Magical and highly recommended. (PS. Has anyone ever seen a Jamie Lee Curtis blurb on a book before?? This book has just one blurb and it's from her: "Beautiful OOPS is funny and fun and is the best gift to give anyone, any-age, anywhere, anytime...") (PS to the PS. Did you see Jamie Lee Curtis is one of the stars of the upcoming Everyone, Everywhere, All At Once. I can't wait for this movie and am excited to share that genius directors Daniels will be on 3 Booksthis spring.)
3. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. (L/I/A) The Road came out in 2006 and is Cormac McCarthy’s most popular book. It was the only one of his I’d read coming into this. (I put it on my 25 books to read during the pandemic ten years ago in March, 2020). That book was like nothing I’d ever read with extreme sparse language (no commas!) and rope-tight poise and control. His second most popular book is No Country For Old Men which came out in 2005. But this book? He wrote it well before those two blockbusters. 1985. Much slower pace, at times a wider plot, but same ridiculously impressive act of mind-boggling economy. Here are the first few sentences for a taste: “See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. His lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.” Me again. You can maybe tell the difference? Reading this book is like watching a master become a master. There isn’t a single misplaced word in the book. Deep, deep penetrating meditation on the role of violence in the history and (maybe) future of our species. Takes place in the very wild western USA and Mexico two hundred years ago and doubles as a writing masterclass. Warning: Extreme, extreme graphic violence throughout.
4. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Thinkby Hans Rosling. (L/I/A)I had this book recommended to me for years and finally picked it up when Chris Hadfield picked it. It’s essentially a long slideshow featuring a lot of “a ha” and “gotcha” type statistics proving why human quality of life is dramatically better now than it has ever been despite our neverending feeling that the world is about to end. I agree with a lot of the arguments but three things: 1) the tone is delivered with a bit of a “sipping martinis at the Davos afterparty” tone, 2) I thought Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker was a better book on the same topic. (I put it on my Best Books of 2018), and 3) I feel like the sheen on some of these books is starting to wear off with “Black Swan” sort of counter-arguments like this one.
5. Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communicationby Vanessa Van Edwards.(L/I/A)Vanessa calls herself a “recovering awkward person” and has a popular YouTube community with advice like “use more hand gestures” and “never pick up the phone in a bad mood.” Bit obvious? Easy to dismiss? I know it’s easy to be cynical. I was cynical, too. But as my old professor Gunnar Trumbull (best name ever) used to say, “It’s much harder to agree with something than disagree.” This book is really a stunning masterclass on body language. Vanessa does “detail by detail workshops” of fascinating moments like the famous first televised presidential debate in 1960 (where people who listened on the radio thought Nixon won and people who watched on TV thought Kennedy won … you’ll read why) and even famous flubs on Shark Tank by incredible entrepreneurs who years later built unicorns. Will most of us know most of what Vanessa discusses? Yes. But will everyone who reads this book will pick up at least a few gold nuggets / satoshis of bitcoin? I do. Highly recommended.
6. I’m Up!by Antoinette Portis. (L/I/A) An absolutely joyous board book to give to new parents or tired parents. “The sun is up, so I am up. / The tree is up. / The bird is up. / And I am up! / So where is everybody? / Mama, wake up! / Daddy, wake up! / See! The sun is up. The park is up. The birds are up and up and up … /” The book manages to empathize with the pure torture of interrupted sleep while also simultaneously celebrating the sheer awe of infant wonder and the love between parents and children. I personally liked it better than Go The F**k to Sleep. Highly recommended. (PS. Check out Antoinette's other great books here.)
7. The Maid by Nita Prose. (L/I/A) A really strange and wonderful thing just happened in the publishing world. One of the industry’s most successful editors, Nita Pronovost, who has edited books like Milk & Honey, Girl On A Train, and yes, You Are Awesome, just put out her debut novel under the name Nita Prose. (What's it called when it's not a pseudonym but not a stage name either? Like the Gary Vaynerchuck to Gary Vee thing is called... someone help me out.) I pre-ordered a handful of copies to support Nita and passed them around when the book pubbed last month. Did my copies help? No! Not at all. The Maid has become an instant #1New York Times bestseller after Good Morning America made it their Book Club pick. It already has 11,339 reviews on Amazon. IN LESS THAN TWO MONTHS. I'm on Page 50 myself and enjoying a Rosie-Project-ish vibe. And I just got this email from my mom who finished it: "Dear Neil : Thank you for your Gift of the Maid. I found myself quite immersed with the naive lead character in the Book. It was a very relaxing book, just what I needed during these tense times. An easy, fast, comfortable, read which I will certainly share with my Book Club. I was quite amused at the references to the Olive Garden being her favorite restaurant. It brought back some memories of my own. Thank You for your gift." Thank you Nita for your gift. And massive congratulations. Well deserved. (Maybe one day Nita will give me permission to share the first 'feedback letter' she gave on an early draft of You Are Awesome ... which I read in the car off my phone while Leslie drove and we had to pull over because it was making us cry.)
8. The Couple’s Comfort Book: A Creative Guide for Renewing Passion, Pleasure, & Commitmentby Jennifer Louden. (L/I/A) Speaking of Leslie, she is not currently crying nor driving. She's right here! Time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick: “John Gottman says that for a relationship to thrive it requires five positive interactions for every one negative. Between parenting our four children, busy work schedules, overflowing garbage bins, and our one-year-old up in the night and then ready for the day at 4am, it’s easy for most of Neil's and my interactions to be logistical, quick, and tactical: “Can you set the table?”, “He needs to poo!”, “Who’s going to get gas?” We’re lucky and grateful they’re not overly negative but by the time the kids are asleep we’re exhausted and there’s little time for those five positive interactions we want and need. The Couple’s Comfort Book by Jennifer Louden is full of ideas on how to nourish a relationship. A whole section called “But There’s Nothing To Do!” with lighthearted ideas like “Play hide and seek around your neighbourhood”, deeply emotional suggestions for “Nurturing during Crisis and Loss” and suggestions on “Releasing Resentment” and “How to Have a Nurturing Fight”. Such a delight to read with an endearingly quirky sense of humor, accessible to pick up and tuck away a tidbit, and a book I know I will come back to again and again.” (PS. Me again. Cormac McCarthy. Leslie will be joining me for some back-to-the-basement reflection and visioning in Chapter 100 of 3 Books. Do you have a question or something you'd like us to discuss? Post it here. Chapter 99 will be a bookstore hang. Chapter 98 will be with IN-Q. Come hang out.)
9. Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative Peopleby Debbie Millman. (L/I/A) What was the first podcast you listened to … ever? I think mine may have been Design Matters with Debbie Millmanwhich has been running for eighteen (!) years. Debbie is truly peerless. She is a former senior branding executive (designing campaigns for Burger King, Haagen-Dazs, and Star Wars), cofounder of the world's first graduate program in branding, author of seven books, and, here's the best part, just found true love and got married during the pandemic. This book is a wonderful transcript of her best interviews over the years including Chris Ware, Allison Bechdel, Ira Glass, and Brené Brown. Features lovely cameos (Forewords, Afterwords, Intros, oh my) from Tim Ferriss, Roxane Gay, and Maria Popova. A very dense cinder block of wisdom I will treasure. Highly recommended. (PS. Hang out with me and Debbie here.)
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Hey everyone,
Well, well, welcome to the seventh year of Neil’s Monthly Book Club. Some of you are new here and others have been hanging out with me since insanecommentsthreads back on 1000 Awesome Things.
I am so grateful to hang out with a city of people just talking about books every month. It’s becoming harder to foster digital communities outside social media but I like to think we're successfully pulling it off. Thank you for this relationship.
Also, every January I remind y’all I have four email lists: a daily awesome thing, a lunar podcast drop, a biweekly poem or speech, and this monthly book club.
I hope you are safe, healthy, and, although it’s not easy, practicing positivity.
Let’s make it a wonderful year.
Onto the books!
Neil
1. Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How To Think Deeply Againby Johann Hari. (L/I/A) Back in Chapter 49 of 3 Books I sat down with Dr. Andrea Sereda who is on the front lines of the safe supply movement in the opioid epidemic. (She once flippantly told me: “I give drugs to drug users.”) One of her most formative books was Chasing The Scream by Johann (“Yo-han”) Hari. The book transfixed me, expanded my views on drugs, and I put it in The Very Best Books I Read in 2019. Three years later Johann is back with a very different offering. Like most of us, he noticed his attention fracturing but, unlike most of us, he decided to decamp for Provincetown, Massachusetts without his phone for six weeks to explore the issue. What emerges is a big feast of a story about many things happening at once: rises in speed and switching, increased algorithm manipulation (with an incredible spotlight on the Center for Humane Technology), crippling flow states, and the death of free-range childhoods. This is a battle we are all fighting today. Reading this book to be better equipped in the trenches. Highly recommended.
2.Up In The Treeby Margaret Atwood. (L/I/A) Margaret Atwood’s dad was a forest entomologist and she grew up in the backwoods of northern Quebec. I imagine her wandering under white spruce and jack pines letting her imagination fester. She started writing poems and stories at six years old and didn’t start full-time school until she was twelve. When she arrived at the University of Toronto in the 1950s she had a dozen years of poetry under her belt and started up a serigraph poster-making business. She ran it off a ping-pong table and the business helped her master lettering and drawings. These histories feed all the way into the playful profundity of this whimsical children’s book she wrote, lettered, and illustrated in 1976 – many years before her big hits like The Handmaid’s Tale. “We live in a tree, way UP in a tree. It’s fun in the sun And a pain in the rain, But we both have umbrellas, Way up in the tree.” A magical treat that feels like a lost book but was graciously republished in 2006 by House of Anansi Press in beautiful new hardcover. 32 pages of simple rhymes with deep soul. A trip you'll be glad you took. Publisher says it's for ages 3-6 but I say ignore that. You do you.
3. The Apollo Murdersby Chris Hadfield. (L/I/A) I stepped into astronaut Chris Hadfield’s kitchen last month. His tiny dog New Henry was jumping at my knees and he had a stack of hundreds of Christmas cards on his marble kitchen table. I was nervous and while setting up my microphones I told Chris I was on page 188 of his book but that I’m reading slow because it’s so technical. “Space is technical,” he deadpanned back. This paceful potboiler (and debut novel) made me feel like a kid reading Tom Clancy books like Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. Chris is a teacher at his core and this spy thriller doubles as an accessible education of the US and Russian space programs throughout the 50s and 60s. Like Tarantino did in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Chris weaves dozens of real people and real histories into the fiction. As you blast off into a non-existent Apollo 18 mission to the moon half the fun is trying to figure out what really happened and what didn’t. (For my conversation with Chris on 3 Books go to Apple or Spotify.)
4. The Art of Roughhousing: Good Old-Fashioned Horseplay and Why Every Kid Needs Itby Anthony T. DeBenedet. (L/I/A) And now it’s time for the Leslie’s Pick – a book chosen by the woman I’m lucky to be married to: “The kids say I’m not as good at wrestling as Neil, that I’m more of a cuddler. So I’ve been reading up on roughhousing to get them laughing, working out their angst, learning about consent and boundaries, and greasing the gears of our relationship. Full of amazing ideas ranging from simple to complex, for six-month-olds to teenagers, from as easy as ‘lie on the couch and pretend to sleep’ and ‘build a pillow fort around yourself and don’t let your kids touch you’ to full-on gymnastics-inspired physical stunts to do with your child. Warning: Yesterday we shattered a vase! But I’m proud to report the boys are beginning to accept mom as a wrestler.”
5. Billionaires: The Lives of the Rich and Powerfulby Darryl Cunningham. (L/I/A) One of the very few mementos I have of my friend Chris Kim is his tattered copy of Maus by Art Spiegelman. He handed me this “graphic novel” about a dozen years ago in his Boston apartment and insisted I read it. I opened to discover a cartoon-drawn cat-and-mouse tale of … the Holocaust? The book is still controversial but it blew me away and I tumbled into the graphic novel hole -- falling in love with works like Persepolis, Summer Blonde, and The Park Bench. I find the format so compelling for communicating twisting stories and detailed histories on a slightly tilted emotional valence. The graphic novel universe continues to expand. Billionaires is marketed as “comics journalism” and reads like a detailed and well-researched biography of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, and Jeff Bezos. Cunningham doesn’t just take the simplified position of “billionaires are bad” but rather wades through denser reads like Dark Money by Jane Mayer, The Everything Store by Brad Stone, and Dial M for Murdoch by Tom Watson and sort of shakes out enough provocative facts and stories to stitch together their lives. Not a definitive read in any way but a great catchup on some of the most powerful people of our time.
6. Otto: A Palindramaby Jon Agee. (L/I/A) And the expanding graphic novel universe now also includes what I’m assuming is the first ever … palindrama. That is: an Alice-on-an-acid-trip style story of a little boy named Otto hypnotically falling into his soup. The book is told entirely in palindromes and opens with Otto sitting in his room reading his comic book LOL beside a bookshelf of toys including Mr. Alarm and Tuna Nut. His mom and dad are downstairs tasting the soup they’ve just made (“Mmm”) and then start calling him. He runs down but starts playing catch with his dog Pip and then his dad yells “Not now Otto – wonton!” He looks up from his bowl of soup to encourage Otto to “Nosh, son!” It gets way weirder from here.Instant classic. Highly recommended!
7.Carrying The Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeyby Michael Collins. (L/I/A) Say you were one of three people selected to blast off on Apollo 11, the first ever mission to land on the moon, but then just before you go they bring the three of you into a room and sit you down. “Neil, Buzz, you two will go down to the moon, walk around, plant a flag, give a speech to the world, talk to the President. Michael? Uh, yeah, well, we need someone to stay up on the ship. Sorry!” Michael takes the bummer in stride and seemingly absorbs every aspect of the experience and channels it into this poetic first-person account of the space program. Part of the beauty is that fifty years ago astronauts were a little less … specialized. Michael Collins is a wide-ranging thinker who writes in a wise, literary style. The book came out in 1974 and is still in print today and part of what's magical in here are the seemingly endless forwards and prefaces. Get this: Charles Lindbergh, who flew the first ever solo transatlantic flight in 1927 (a harrowing 33-hour hour trip from New York to Paris!) writes a completely breathtaking introduction that captures the human spirit towards flight. Lindbergh died the year the book came out so the foreword doubles as a baton from our attempted voyages into the air back in the 1800s to the Musk / Bezos space flights of today (which are discussed in the latest foreword written by Collins in his late 80s.) A wonderful book that deserves a spot on your shelf. And speaking of baton-passing, if you want to explore that idea a bit, you can watch my TED Listen from a few years back which has “What is your baton?” as its central theme.
8. Klara and the Sunby Kazuo Ishiguro. (L/I/A)A slow-paced future dystopian spine-tingler told in first person by Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF) available for purchase by parents looking to give their kids a leg-up on the tutoring scene. I thought the first act with Klara’s experience of the world staring out the window of a retail store was just gripping and the smooth, precise world-building is mesmerizing. I had never read anything by Ishiguro before (no book guilt, no book shame) but when I knew he’d won the Pulitzer Prize and the Booker, I was getting my dictionary handy. Turns out you don’t need it! The language is deceptively simple and runs like poetry. I will say the book’s pace really dragged in the wide, wide middle. And I wish I could say there was a huge payoff at the end but … I didn’t feel it. Two or three scenes had electric energy and I found myself going back to reread them but maybe my internet-burnt brain was bogged down by too many long, slow turns. My biggest takeaway it that I’d like to go read one of his older books like Never Let Me Go or TheRemains of the Day.
9. Inhabiting the Negative Spaceby Jenny Odell. (L/I/A) Something happens to my brain after I fall deeply in love with a piece of art from any artist. I tell myself I must soak in their entire body of work in order to, I don’t know, better merge DNA strands or something? That means I’m still listening to new Radiohead albums and I watch every Charlie Kaufman movie. Does the strategy pay off? Well, it’s like panning for gold. For every “King of Limbs” there’s an “In Rainbows”, for every “Synecdoche, New York” there’s an “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." The panning for gold phase of following an artist has lows but also gives some of the richest pleasures as the artist (often) fine-tunes their voice and laser focuses on that one exact specific thing they – not “the market” – want to focus on. So that’s kind of why I picked up this Jenny Odell “book.” Book in quotation marks because it’s just the speech transcript for the Commencement Address Jenny gave virtually during covid to the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. This is only for superfans of How To Do Nothing, which I'd highly recommend starting with first.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
We’re closing in on another year.
As Toronto nights get colder and darker I’m really noticing the toll of the past two years. Living inside the pandemic’s emotional envelope has been draining and heavy. Some days just feel like molasses.
It was in that goopy emotional state that my distant college friend Mat texted me out of the blue last week to tell me his dad Andy had suddenly died of a drowning accident. Just horrible news. I've never met Andy but felt like I had. He was a member of this community since the beginning and often wrote back to my Book Club emails with feedback, suggestions, and recommendations. Later in our exchange Mat wrote "He felt strangely close to you via email" ... and I paused on that. Because, well, I feel strangely close to all of you, too. I guess if you've read my books or emails for a while, you already knew that.
The obituary Mat and his sister wrote made me cry. If you feel like briefly connecting with a stranger who read every single one of these book club emails up to this one, you can read it here.
It’s the post-Thanksgiving swoon down south and as a Canadian I’ve been enjoying all the gratitude flying around Twitter. Normally Twitter is a rabbit hole of endless emotional pain but this time of year there are some really nice strings like this one.
What am I thankful for?
This community.
I really have no idea why you’re reading this. Did you get The Book of Awesome as a Christmas present ten years ago? Give one to a teacher? Are you a Cover To Cover Club member of 3 Books? Hear my Google Talk on The Happiness Equation? Get You Are Awesome in your company’s orientation package? Watch me on the news two days ago? Or maybe your great Aunt Linda forwarded you this email because she forwards you three dozen emails a day and you just started reading it and you really have no idea where you are right now.
Well, however you got here, let me just say you made it to the right place.
Thanks for hanging out for a monthly chat about books.
This month’s book club is dedicated to Andy Balez.
Neil
1. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Do you realize in the late 90s it was apparently not uncommon for a magazine to send a freelance journalist to just, you know, climb Mount Everest? And come back and write a story about it? It happened! Outside Magazine sent Jon Krakauer to climb Mount Everest and report on the growing commercialization of the mountain. He ended up being intimately close to one of the greatest Everest disasters of all time with eight people – including the leaders of both tour companies he was following – dying over a dramatic few hours at the summit. Jon wrote a massive 17,000 word article in the September, 1996 issue of Outside (check out thegripping cover) and then expanded it into this book the next year. An extremely straight-faced thriller (I don't think there is a single exclamation mark in the book) with twists and turns and plenty of provocative questions around decision-making under stress and leadership in crisis. I know a business school professor who uses it this book in class. And, it really does feel you’re climbing Everest when you read it. Highly recommended.
2.Book of Longingby Leonard Cohen. There’s a wonderful music shop in Toronto called Sonic Boom and they have a small masterfully curated book section in the corner. (I once walked out of there with Lincoln in the Bardo, The Tao of Wu, and a Choose Your Own Adventure. You can check out their online bookstore here.) Anyway, I was there last week glancing at this book on a table. A twenty year old book of Leonard Cohen poetry? I knew nothing about it. But then the two women browsing next to me looked at my book and started gushing. “Oh, I love that book!”, “Oh me too, it’s one of my favorites!” I was surprised but even more surprised when they actually started quoting some of the poems. I learned Kendall was marrying Kennedy’s brother and they’d flown in from Vancouver and Calgary for wedding dress shopping. I got intrigued with the poems and asked them to dog-ear all their favorites and I suddenly ended up buying a book with a couple dozen poems marked by two strangers. As we say in our Values: Good things happen in bookstores. How are the poems? Strange, sharp, occasionally confusing, often delightful. (I agree with a New York Times blurb on the book saying: “Book Of Longing has exceptional range. It is clear yet steamy, cosmic yet private, both playful and profound.”) Here’s the poem Thousands – one of my favorites so far:
Out of the thousands who are known, or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts trying to look like the real thing. Needless to say I am one of the fakes, and this is my story
3. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Bodyby Roxane Gay. (Trigger warning: This review talks about sexual abuse.) I was very nervous to interview Roxane last year. (I'm sure you can tell.) I prepare for my interviews by setting myself an unachievable goal: read everything the person I'm interviewing has ever written plus read everything that’s ever been written about them plus read their three most formative books. I love living in somebody else’s psyche for couple weeks but rarely make it further than where ten or twenty hours takes me. But when I interviewed Roxane I spent much, much longer and came up much, much shorter. Where do you begin? Her thousands of Goodreads reviews (where she’s often the most popular reviewer on the whole site), her trove of Medium articles, her “Work Friend” New York Times column, her prolific Twitter feed, or, you know, her actual books. So many books! She’s written novels and edited poetry and even written Black Panther: World of Wakanda. I read and really enjoyed her essay collection Bad Feminist last year but it took me a lot longer to finally start Hunger. And once you start this book? There is no turning back. An incredible window into a young Haitian-American woman from an upstanding family coming of age in 70s and 80s Omaha, Nebraska ... and feeling many kinds of hunger throughout. In the beginning the book appears to be about food and weight. She opens Chapter 3 by saying "At my heaviest I weighed 577 pounds at six feet, three inches tall” but then we are taken deeply into her horrifying teenage rape and many zig-zagging challenges that follow. She has an economical “Hemingway on Twitter” style of writing that reads very fast and addictive once you fall into it. I often talk about research showing that fiction completely absorbs us into another identity and helps grow empathy, compassion, and understanding. This book absolutely does the same. Here’s a paragraph from the last third of the book: “Sometimes, I get angry when I think about how my sexuality was shaped. I get angry that I can draw a direct line between the first boy I loved, the boy who made me into the girl in the woods, and the sexual experiences I have had since. I get angry because I no longer want to feel his hands on my desires. I worry that I always will.” Emotionally shaking, highly recommended.
4. The Birds of Americaby John James Audobon. I found this massive book of bird paintings in a used book store last month and left it on the coffee table where it’s great flipping through with the kids. Completely mesmerizing realistic hand-drawn paintings of hundreds and hundreds of birds. I know little about James Audobon and the Audobon Society and it seems his life really only still getting colored in. The book is stunning – costing over two million dollars in today’s money to make and taking over fourteen years of field observations and drawings in the early 1800s. The copy I found was a 1950s reprint. A feast for birders with often ‘life sized’ paintings of hundreds of birds. Contains at least a half dozen birds that are now extinct including the Carolina parakeet, Passenger pigeon, Labrador Duck, Great Auk, Heath Hen, and Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. (Or is the Ivory-billed extinct???)
5. The Americansby Robert Frank. After World War II Robert Frank emigrated to America and spent time in the early 50s travelling across the country capturing an outsider’s view of his new homeland. The Guardian describes this book of simple black-and-white photos as ‘perhaps the most influential photography book of the twentieth century.’ There is a photo of three skinny black men in black suits, bow ties, and straw hats leaning on a shiny black car in a grassy field with the simple title “Funeral – St. Helena, South Carolina.” There is a poofy-haired middle-aged redhead in a sleek one-shouldered dress leaning over a craps table in a dark room under a bright hanging light with the title “Casino – Elko, Nevada”. There is a long black-and-white marble counter with stools crammed full of twentysomething white men sipping drinks underneath giant cardboard ‘Orange Whip 10 cents” signs over their head with the title “Drug store – Detroit.” So much more than meets the eye in every picture and a book you’ll flip through again and again. Jack Kerouac writes in the introduction: “Anybody doesnt like these pitchers dont like potry, see?”
6. The Camping Tripby Jennifer K. Mann. I think I was probably twenty-four when I first went camping. Overnight camping, I mean. I’d been to camp sites, I’d been to camp grounds, I’d even stayed in the occasional cottage in the bush and roasted marshmallows for the full, you know, camp-like experience. But I never really went camping. My Indian immigrant parents weren’t much help on the outdoors. My dad never built a fire, my mom never pitched a tent. Who had time to go camping between extra clarinet practice and math club? (I can see my parents laughing while reading this. Actually, my mom laughing. Pretty sure my dad deletes all my emails. Hi mom!) Anyway, you might see why I loved this book sharing the story of (younger than twenty-four-year-old) Ernestine going camping for the first time. I could relate to her fear of fish in the lake, feeling like her feet are hurting on hikes, and being scared and up all night in the tent. I could also relate to the awe of seeing the biggest tree you’ve ever seen, making your first campfire s’mores, and the awe of staring into the endless stars at night. A wonderful book.
7. The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry. Dave Cheesewright was my boss for four years when I worked at Walmart. He's the retired former CEO of Walmart International and maybe the most exceptional corporate leader I’ve seen in action. (He was the basis of many, many stories in The Happiness Equation although I couldn’t name him at the time.) He told me The Little Prince was one of his three most formative books and I just had fun revisiting it. The book is short! Only 16,534 words on 125 pages. And I discovered it is the third top-selling book of all-time! (Go ahead and guess which two books you think are above it and then click here to see if you were right.) An astoundingly dense mass of accessible wisdom with drawings Saint-Exupéry did himself throughout. Incredibly tragic-ironic (what’s the word for that?) that the opening scene of this book – a pilot crash-landing his tiny plane in the desert – was essentially replicated by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry himself who crash landed in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Occupied France July 1944. His body was never found and a remnant of his plane only discovered in 2003. The Little Prince has been translated into 300 languages for good reason and, if you’re still not convinced, here’s the entirety of one of my favorite chapters in the book -- Chapter 13 – coming to us courtesy of some dodgy 1994 Angelfire page. That’ll give you a taste of the rest.
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Hey everyone,
I’m writing this from an airplane for the first time in a year and a half.
When I launched this monthly book club back in October 2016 I was doing most of my reading and writing on planes. Giving like fifty or sixty speeches a year meant lots of time in the skies.
As the pandemic fogs start lifting I know I’ll never go back to that level of airplane time again. Why? Well, the adages are true: Time is irreplaceable. Kids never grow younger. We are what we do. And our days really are our lives.
And yet here I am. Back on a plane. And, to just suddenly pop out the other side of the hedge here, there do seem to be aspects of traveling that are just so precious … and maybe even irreplaceable? Like a deep five hours of being lost in a good book before landing somewhere with palm trees. The way I could completely tear apart a chapter of a book and put it all back together again under a lonely dim light with a hundred people sleeping around me. And the endless natural zoomout that comes from looking out little windows and reflecting on the endless beauty of the world around us.
Thank you deeply for another chat across time and space. Wherever you are, wherever you may be, I’m excited as always to hang out at the end of the month and chat about books. This is a real joy and I always love your responses with comments or suggestions anytime.
Lots of love to you and yours,
Neil
1. Frankensteinby Mary Shelley. Somewhere near the beginning of the pandemic David Mitchell reminded us: “If a book is in print a hundred years later there is a very good reason.” How many books over a hundred years old do you read? Vast swaths of our cultural history all annexed into stories with the same fears and dreams and struggles and hopes we’re all still wrestling through today. The sheer number of ways this two-hundred-year-old book touched me is impossible to count. The story is well known: The well-educated Victor Frankenstein spends years away at college passionately building what becomes a monster who escapes and haunts him to his final days. Simple, right? But this book is broken into three and... that’s just book one and three, really. Book two hits something like The Empire Strikes Back with the entire book a 1700s gilded British gentry type monologue from ‘the daemon’ (who isn't named the entire book) to Victor himself when they meet in one of the most incredibly vivid scenes I’ve ever read – on any icy summit high up in the Alps. That flips all the overtrodden narratives about Frankenstein on its head and buries the final book under an infinitely complicated tapestry of emotionally wrenching scenes, moral questions, and scarring moments that hit deep. This book is what fiction is all about. I can’t recommend it enough. After reading the book I read up on Mary Shelley a bit. Wow, she suffered immense loss in her life. Her mother (also a writer!) died giving birth to her in 1797. In 1815, she gave birth to her first daughter who died two weeks later. That daughter was never named. In fact, it was a dream she had where the baby was simply warmed by the fire and came to life before being snatched away by a hideous demon which -- yes, seriously -- inspired this book. To say there is real pain baked into the pages would be an understatement. Mary's pain kept going and she gave birth to four more children ... all of whom died before the age of three. Many relatives also perished from suicide. And a brain tumor took Mary's own life in her early 50s. Heartbreaking. Heartmelting. Heartwrenching. And beautiful. (One fyi: I just accidentally ended up with the 1818 first edition. That's where the link above goes to on Project Gutenberg. Here's the more popular and well-known 1831 third edition. And here's a list of the differences.) Add this to your bucket list! A must-read feast for the senses.
2.Hell Yeah Or Noby Derek Sivers. Nobody beats to their own drum more than Derek Sivers. Tim Ferriss calls him a ‘philosopher-operator and poet-recluse of the highest order.’ He lives all over the world with his nine-year-old son. He journals hundreds of pages and distills them down into 100-word bits of poignancy … and absolutely brilliant 3-minute TED Talks. (I used “the first follower” in my Walmart leadership development classes!) What’s his secret? Well, he says in that glib-but-honest Derek-Sivers-way, “It helps making a million dollars first.” He started CD Baby in that little blink after people started buying stuff online but before Napster and mp3 takeovers. (Anyone else have a favorite Winamp skin?) Since then? He’s sold the company and essentially dedicates his time to being a full-time … learner and giver. That’s it! And we are all greater for it. He reads so much, posts honest reviews, shares wonderfully accessible essays, writes and sells his own books at cost (from only his own website, to only his readers.) He’s very Dave Eggers when he says he doesn’t really even believe in .. apps! Or games! Or social media! He’s simultaneously extremely off-grid but yet his Web 1.0 online offering has that Berkshire-Hathaway-Annual-Report-feel of being just absolutely teeming with wisdom, written on a piece of paper by an eight year old. This book’s title is one of Derek’s most famous principles: Hell Yeah or No! For every offer you get in life make sure it’s a “Hell Yeah!” or else? Automatic no. (I wrote about it, too.) A wonderful compact collection of wisdom. I am very happy to share Derek gave 3 Books a “Hell Yeah!” and will be our next guest on the upcoming new moon. For release date? Look up to the sky. Ow-ow-owooooooooo!
3. Miss Nelson Is Missingby James Marshall. Okay, those were two pretty long reviews to kick this thing off so let me just say that this was one of my absolute favorite books as a kid and I want to say thank you to downtown Toronto indie bookstore Queen Books for putting it in their front window and giving me a huge nostalgia jolt. I ran inside, bought a few copies, and it filled me with delight. Click here to order from Queen Books yourself or click here to have Mrs. Wrightsman, a first grade teacher, read you the book right now on Youtube. Lie on your stomach on a dirty green carpet for full effects.
4. Foreverby Judy Blume. I am getting addicted to outdoor podcasts. I love that aural tapestry that comes from skateboarders rolling past, birdcalls in the background (anyone remember this post I wrote on 1KAT???), and strangers walking right up to ask questions. Last month I chatted with Zafar the Hamburger Man on a street bench outside his burger joint and pulled up metal chairs in Bryant Park in Manhattan with Mel Robbins on her pub day. One of Mel’s three most formative books is Forever by Judy Blume. When she was in middle-school the girls kept a contraband copy on top of the circle sink in the bathroom and told each other which passages to read with the steamiest sex scenes. It became the book that introduced her to sex. Our kids should be so lucky! Sure, the book has vivid sex scenes. Sure, some of them are ... strange. (They name his penis ‘Ralph’ and Mel said she thought all guys called their penis Ralph for a long time). But we need to teach sex – the feelings and emotions of sex -- through reading. Do we not? Or am I just a father of boys who is very afraid of the Internet? Do you have a sex-scene-filled book that you might actually pass along to your kids? Reply and let me know. I’d love to share a few over the years. As Judy Blume told us way back in Chapter 6, "Bring back sex scenes in books!"
5. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdomby Jonathan Haidt. The subtitle is a lot more accurate than the title here. It’s not really about happiness! And, actually, there’s not that much “finding”, either. More exploring. Exploring modern truths through ancient wisdom. Who would buy that, though? This is one of Jonathan Haidt’s earliest books -- published fifteen years ago -- but it holds up incredibly well. A great place to start hanging out with him. Fifteen years ago, Jonathan was a guy with a slew of degrees teaching an intro psych course at the University of Virginia. And he was a big reading nerd who had spent years seeking wisdom through deep readings of the Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, Old and New Testaments, the Koran, Carnegie, Tolstoy, Proust, and thousands of others. To me this book feels like one of the world’s big thinkers issuing himself a throwdown: Could he ferment and codify some of his own thinking based on all the classics he’d read while making sure it all braided together into the modern research he was doing? “What should I do, how should I live, and whom should I become?” That’s actually the book’s first line. And what follows are not “easy answers”– no clever 2x2s or pithy one-liners – but rather a very deep introspective dinner conversation about life’s biggest truths and how we might explore them today. Adversity! Divinity! Love! Virtue! You will leave with more questions than answers but it’s such a privilege and joy to consider them. If the world serves you too much stock, simple, and shallow, this is a wonderfully philosophical door that opens straight into the deep.
6. The Look of the Bookby Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth. Zoom in on the picture of this book at the top of this email. There are little snippets from 14 different book covers. How many do you recognize? I think I got maybe seven or eight. This book doesn’t even pretend to denounce the phrase “You can’t judge a book by its cover” – it just glorifies that the opposite is true, takes us on a vivid and wonderful history of book covers, and lets us mentally explore the specific power that book jackets provide. Especially in this new day and age of icons-and-one-inch-avatars-for-everything. (Do not get me started on Memojis.) Veers a bit too fiction-only for my tastes and the organization is scattered like a messy desk. But if you like messy desks and want to stroke your inner book nerd, you will find great joy in this book.
7. Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition: A Theory of Judgmentby Howard Margolis.Thinking about thinking really has become a huge trend. The original popularity of “life hacking” or “lifestyle design” blogs. The rise in psychedelics and consciousness exploration. The somewhat originally-meta-but-now-commonplace-podcast-trope of asking people how they’re thinking about everything they’re thinking about. WE SURE ARE DOING A LOT OF THINKING THESE DAYS. But, uh, how do we actually think? Like ... what even is thinking? How do our brains, you know, work? I recommend this dense, academic University of Chicago publication which offers an extremely articulate and well-argued answer: patterns. That’s it! Now you know. We think in patterns. We don’t think like computers. Even though that’s what most people believe. Inputs, outputs, dusty hard drives, all out of RAM when we’re looking for the remote. No! The first chapter shows a number of mental models that seem simple on the surface but stump our pattern-based brains. From there the book gets perhaps a bit too heavy – okay, definitely too heavy – but it hammers home this wonderful point that helps you see things like ‘the stories you tell yourself’ or ‘the tribes you’re part of’ or ‘the cultures you believe in’ or ‘the habits that mould your identity’ as much, much more malleable than they appear on the surface.
8. Skunk and Badgerby Amy Timberlake and Jon Klassen. My friend Michael Bungay-Stanier, author of the million-copy (!) bestseller The Coaching Habit, gave me this book for my birthday. I am glad he did. I thought it was a kids book! It looks like a kids book! It’s marketed as a kids book! But it is not a kids book. Badger lives alone in his distant aunt’s row house when the doorbell rings and Skunk informs him she’s given him permission to live there, too. What follows is a complex portrait of friendship which pulls off The Little Prince-like acrobatics of smacking you in the head with sentences that seem simple on the surface but reveal much deeper truths. Jon Klassen is the atmospheric award-winning artist behind popular picture books like This is Not My Hat and his work – featured in full color shiny illustration-only pages!!! – really brings the story to life. Last thing: when I say this book isn’t for kids I don’t mean kids can’t read it. There’s nothing objectionable. I just thought it was written at a pretty advanced level and the themes went really deep. Or maybe I’m just dumb! One of the two.
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Hey everyone,
It’s been a long September and I try to believe that maybe this year will be better than the last.
I have now passed 500 straight days writing one daily pandemic awesome. I post them daily here and you can get them over email, too. I also released a podcast with my two-year-old and one with incredible puzzler Jason Shiga whose mesmerizing book I revisited below.
And now let's get to the books...
Neil
1. Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint For Work That Makes You Come Aliveby Jonathan Fields. Podcasts were exploding in 2016 when I went on book tour for The Happiness Equation. Knowing nothing about podcasts except “they’re popular!” I said yes to every request I received. I did maybe a hundred podcasts and burnt myself out. I was running way too fast and now when I look back the only podcast I actually remember doing was Good Life Project with Jonathan Fields. It was live! That was the first difference. I went to an address in New York and was surprised it was … residential. I was welcomed in by a gentle, mild-mannered, deep-eyed guy named Jonathan who made me a cup of tea and then invited me into his studio. We went deeper and further than I had in other interviews. Jonathan is that kind of person. Deep, far -- and always serving. He has a wonderful big-hearted community and, perhaps because of the wisdom he exudes, the question he's been asked by them, more than any other, is 'What should I do with my life?' Well, he’s spent years thinking about it and put together a new assessment tool called Sparketypes which is designed to help people ‘find the work that comes alive.’ The book just dropped and it’s a really beautiful aid for people looking to find their best self at work. It's got the 'key takeaways!' part of a traditional business assessment tool (like MBTI or StrengthsFinder) but there's a lot of heart and soul in it embracing the grey. Here's a cool trailer Jonathan put together and his chat on The Rich Roll Podcast just came out, too. And, maybe most importantly, here's the link to the free Sparketype assessment online. (I'm a Maven / Maker. What are you?) Highly recommended.
2. The People In The Trees by Hanya Yanagihara. Mrs. Dorsman sat us down on the green carpet on our first day of third grade. “Where did you go this summer?,” she asked. "I went on a road trip to California and I went to Rome and I went to Tokyo … and I went to Antarctica … and I went to the moon!” Puzzlement set in before the big reveal a couple seconds later. “THROUGH BOOKS!" Did your third grade teacher say something similar? I think most of us have heard a variation of ‘books are places’ but I admit I hadn’t thought about it in a long time until I read The People In The Trees. An absolutely stunningly detailed visual feast of a novel that completely transports you into the dense jungles surrounding a lost tribe on a remote South Pacific island. The novel reads completely like non-fiction. I flipped back to the front a couple times to confirm it was a novel. It opens with some Reuters and Associated Press wire articles explaining how 71-year-old Nobel Prize winning scientist Norton Perina has been charged with sexual abuse of a minor. You then meet the first narrator – Norton’s buddy Ronald – who explains he’s painstakingly collected Norton’s handwritten memoirs from jail – the shocking true story! -- and is publishing them for you here with his added preface, epilogue, and detailed footnotes throughout. There are a lot of things happening in this book all at the same time which results in a kind of fast-pulsing-beats-over-slow-strings type quality. Narrator reliability, big questions around globalization, science, and anthropological ethics, and sharp prose that constantly guts and illuminates. When Norton heads into the jungle he says “A creature, its malachite-dark back diamonded with scales, skittered across my feet, a wraithlike monkey shrieked from a tree…” Then: “Around me the jungle hummed, a low, ceaseless buzz, as if the entire island were some sort of mysterious appliance plugged into an enormous yet invisible energy source.” Later: “There were so many shades and tones of green – serpent, aphid, pear, emerald, sea, grass, jade, spinach, bile, pine, caterpillar, cucumber, steeped tea, raw tea." Illuminating, right? But it's gutting, too. After revealing his mother died of a brain aneurysm he writes “… I pictured it often, all but heard the soft explosion as the artery burst, saw the coil of soggy, flaccid tissue, the black blood staining the brain the shining, sticky red of pomegranates.” Haunting, hopeful, smooth, sharp, tender, fierce. A long and slow big deep breath of a book.
3.The High-Five Habitby Mel Robbins. Five years ago I flew into Vegas early and caught the speaker onstage the day before me. It was Mel Robbins. I was amazed watching her zap the room like a lightning bolt. I mean, she had a big room full of accountants in crisp dress shirts laughing, crying, and standing up in their chairs. Accountants! It was magic. She distills messages down to their most simplified versions imaginable – and then somehow simplifies them again. She's not a pretender and serves from a place of deep humility. That's one of her many superpowers. (Here’s a few of her others.) Since I met Mel she’s gone on to host a TV show, become Audible’s most listened to audio personality, lead a massive online community, and now has her first book coming out in five years. What’s it about? High fiving yourself in the mirror. No, I’m not joking. Actually high-fiving yourself in the actual mirror. Sounds beyond trite, trivial, and eye-rolly. But, the weird thing is, it actually works. Have you heard the research around smiling when you get up? Saying I love you to yourself? Making eye contact for thirty seconds? There’s a lot out there and, sure, many of us have Stuart Smalley sketches floating through our heads but, I say, in this day and age, with an endless barrage of spam designed to bait and hook our attentions while simultaneously making us feel horrible about ourselves and emptying our wallets, well, all we really have for sure is ourselves. So we better figure out how to treat ourselves well. This book helps you do that.
4. Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick, a book chosen by the teacher, community leader, and mother of four boys I am lucky to be married to. Over to Leslie: “A mentor of mine once told me that it’s impossible for the human brain to be curious and judgmental at the same time. Maybe it’s partly for this reason that Neil and I have always agreed that one of the most important values we want to foster is curiosity. Bodies are Cool does just that. It really is the best book I’ve read encouraging all types of body positivity and inviting children and parents into a safe space to connect over curiosity of different bodies, discuss their own personal preferences, and (maybe) better understand their own expressions of themselves. Catchy rhyming text and popping illustrations with incredible body diversity leads to endless launching points for discussion. It’s hard not to dream of a world where every child grows up thinking this way about their body and everybody else’s!"
5.The Righteous Mindby Jonathan Haidt. I think it was my friend David Cain, author of one of my favorite blogs Raptitude, who first suggested I read Jonathan Haidt. Since then I have picked up three of his books, listened to him on a lot of podcasts (Dax Shepard, Joe Rogan, Jonathan Fields, Sam Harris) and have come to see him as one of the most fascinating and fearless thinkers around. When I picked up this book I had no idea what the title meant and the first few phrases in the book – moral psychology, moral minds -- didn't help. But eventually my slow brain started catching up and I began vibing on Jonathan’s (very quick) wavelength. Things started falling into place. Part 1 of the book explores the idea that "intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second" (he has a wonderful 'elephant and rider' metaphor around our conscious and subsconscious minds -- little video here), Part 2 that "there's more to morality than harm and fairness", and Part 3 that "morality binds and blinds." This is a big book which zooms way up and over the majority of conversations we are having today. It reads something like the source code behind a lot of society's ugly social ills and it's no wonder Jonathan's formed wise thoughts way back down the ladder rungs on things as diverse as income inequality, peanut allergies, and social media. As Jonathan said in an interview with Ezra Klein: “We’re trying to build a diverse, secular, tolerant, peaceful society.” This book is a big cinder block dropped into the foundation of that build. Challenging, eye-opening, and well worth the effort. I know I'll be revisiting it again and again.
6. Meanwhileby Jason Shiga. When I was a kid ‘game books’ were massive with Choose Your Own Adventure books selling almost half a billion copies. They were so simple, enticing, and a wonderful complement (and antidote) to video games. Well, this is a wild contemporary book by pure mathematics whiz and puzzle genius Jason Shiga. You play the role of a small boy going out for ice cream but soon your day slips into all kinds of splintered pathways involving mad scientists, time travelling machines, and all with (of course) the fate of the world at stake. Chances are very good you will die. Chances are also very good you will enjoy dying and then just start again. Head-twisting, frenetic, wonderfully wild. I really feel like this book really deserves a wider audience. Especially if you have any hard-to-wrangle-into-reading people in your house. Jason Shiga was also my guest in Chapter 87 of 3 Books which just dropped on last week’s Harvest Moon.
7. Planet Omarby Zanib Mian and Nasaya Mafaridik. A fairly new middle-grade chapter book series featuring Omar, his older sister Maryam (who knows 28 surahs of the Qur’an by heart), his little brother Esa (who mortifies his brother by blowing his toy whistle during dead silence at the mosque), his mom (a scientist who wears a hijab and drinks a lot of coffee), and his dad (also a scientist, rides a motorcycle). The book is a simple story about moving to a new town and being nervous about going to school but laid across a thoughtful and generous introduction of Muslim culture and practices. It’s over 200 pages but magical design makes it a fun and fast read. The book came out as The Muslims in the UK three years ago and has won a slew of awards.
8. 111 Places In Toronto That You Must Not Missby Anita Mai Genua, Clare Davenport and Elizabeth Lenell Davies. Are you starting to rediscover your hometown? Maybe even getting on planes again? It’s good to get back out there as things open up. I feel like tourist books are a nice re-entry point. I confess I’d become a bit of a Toronto snob – knowing where to go, what to do, what to see. But no! I have been humbled by the many gems in this wonderful book that were new to me. In an era of infinite choice the value of curation skyrockets. And this book is masterfully curated towards “accessibly odd” -- from a residential home covered in dolls to leftover brick walls of our notorious insane asylum to the oldest tree in the city to original Banksy's now entombed in plexiglass downtown. Do you have a really good “accessibly odd” guidebook to your hometown? I feel like the good ones are really good in this little sub genre so please reply and let me know.
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Hey everyone,
How is almost September 2021?
Are your pandemic years starting to blur, too?
Well, I hope you are safe and hanging in there and I hope you get a chance to squeeze some loved ones tight this fall. Consider these emails a virtual squeeze from me. I won't rub my scratchy beard on your face but I do have nine book reviews and recommendations for you this month.
Btw: This is our third month of sending book links to indie bookstores. If you have the resources to support a great bookshop, thank you for considering clicking a title below and ordering a book or two from the wonderful independent bookstore Books & Books of Florida. 3 Bookers will recall Chapter 6 with Judy Blume, Chapter 9 with Dave Barry, and Chapter 16 with award-winning bookseller Mitchell Kaplan were all recorded in their magical stores! They ship internationally with a lot of love and just put out a list of essential Afghanistan reading which I'm checking out. (Btw: I have also heard from many of you that you really like when I link to author / publisher pages so I put those in a bracketed asterisk after each title, too.)
And now -- onto the books!
Neil
1. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals(*) by Oliver Burkeman. For many years Oliver Burkeman wrote the wise and witty column for The Guardian called “This column will change your life” which examined the wide world of self-help. (He even wrote about me eleven years ago!) Well, he’s stopped the weekly columns now -- his final offering was masterful -- and now he's here, today, with us, offering a wonderfully deep and thoughtful examination of real time management. Not the Inbox Zero whack-more-moles-per-minute variety but the much more intentional month-by-month, year-by-year kind. Wisdom is seeping out of this book like a sponge you just pulled out of deep water. Spending time in Oliver's company made me feel less anxious and more calm -- about almost everything. He is a soothing wizard. I can’t recommend it enough. If you liked books like How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton or In Praise of Slow by Carl Honoré then you’ll love this book. He has a wonderful newsletter you should sign up for, too.
2.Connected Parenting: Transform Your Challenging Child and Build Loving Bonds for Life(*) by Jennifer Kolari. It’s been a couple months since we had a Leslie’s pick so over to my wonderful wife for this one: “When a baby cries getting out of the bath our instinct is to say something like ‘Ohhhh, sweet baby, you’re so cold! It was so nice in your bath and now you’re shivering!’ This ‘mirroring’ helps calm and grow the brain. But when our children start to talk it seems something shifts and when they cry or whine or yell we say things like ‘Stop crying. I told you the bath was only going to be five minutes and now you’re not listening to me. Stop!’ In this book, Jennifer Kolari uses stories and humor to teach parents how to mirror with our children as they get older to calm them, build connection, and set limits with empathy and love rather than anger and frustration.” (For more of Leslie listen to our recent chats with Brené Brown and Kristin Neff.)
3. How To Pronounce Knife: Stories(*)by Souvankham Thammavongsa. The most prestigious book award in Canada is The Giller Prize and every year the winner takes home a cool hundred grand and a trophy that looks like a trippy pile of ice blocks. Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Mordecai Richler are all past winners and this year the prize went to Souvankham Thammavongsa for this book. (She's the one holding the trippy ice blocks.) Souvankham was born in a Lao refugee camp and moved to Toronto as a child. The short stories (most no more than five pages!) all illuminate different shades of the immigrant experience. Often the Laotian immigrant experience. The stories can be dark but they're written like little smalltown gossipy page-flippers. You can really feel the influence from Alice Munro. I loved the book and read it cover to cover. For a sense of her breezy-with-a-bag-of-hammers style check out her short story "Good-looking" published a few months ago in The New Yorker. If that one hits you, you'll love this book.
4.The Midnight Library(*)by Matt Haig. This is the first book I have ever seen with over 100,000 Amazon reviews. Millions and millions sold. A quick read about a down-in-the-dumps protagonist named Nora Seed who seems to go through life with a tuba blatting after every scene. She’s fired from her job. Her cat is hit by a car. It goes on and on. She cannot live with herself so she attempts to take her own life but ends up in a -- cue maroon stage curtain squeakily rising -- midnight library instead. What happens there? Well, she meets a kind of brittle Yoda character who gives her options to something like backwards-butterfly-effect her life by ... pulling different books off the shelf. Okay, I am clearly in the very small minority here but the book ... didn’t resonate. A lot of the “what if?” scenarios felt much too cliché – she becomes an Olympic gold medalist, she becomes a world famous rock star – and the early underlying theme of “Every choice is imperfect, value what you have, and seize the day!” is fine but seemed too surface for the murky swamp I feel like we're all swimming in these days. (Does this tweet resonate with you, too?) Maybe Souvankham Thammavongsa had me thinking about things on a deeper level? Was I snacking on a tub of popcorn right after driving into a farm fresh cob loaded with salt and butter? I don't know. What I do know is that whereas many of the 4-5 page stories in How To Pronounce Knife made me gasp or tear up or stare at the ceiling for a couple minutes after, this 300 page book didn’t give me any feeling. Other than an urge to get to the next book. U could have just hit it at the wrong time.
5. Maybe You Should Talk To Someone(*) by Lori Gottlieb. Do you listen to The Moth? It’s been one of the highest rated podcasts since podcasts were invented sometime in the early 80s alongside MTV, Michael Jackson, and Fruit Roll-Ups. They make excellent books too – like this one and this one – which are perfect for our Enlightened Toilet Reading series. One Moth story I’ve loved for years is called “The Whole Package” by Lori Gottlieb. (Click "Listen now" halfway down this page to hear it.) That story has nothing to do with this book but does give you a flavor for Lori's voice and her wonderfully twisting storytelling ability. Maybe You Should Take To Someone (what a perfect title) tells twisting stories of five people in therapy – including Lori! – and does a great job of illuminating the therapeutic process in a dramatic, edge-of-your-seat way. Pairs wonderfully with her Dear Therapist column in The Atlantic and her Dear Therapists podcast, too. Does she ever sleep? It appears not because she even made time to be my guest on Chapter 84 of 3 Books. (Listen on Apple or Spotify.)
6. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe(*)by Jane Wagner. What’s your reading nitro? When you hit an inevitable slow patch, when it feels like you are twenty pages into five different books and can’t seem to find one that’s sucking you in, what do you do? How do you get going again? My go-tos are middle-grade books I love (like Sideways Stories From Wayside School), graphic novels, and, yes, scripts. Movie scripts, theater scripts, just something with a quarter of the "words per page" of my usual books so I feel that nitro charge me back up. This is a wonderfully wacky script of a Tony Award winning one-woman stage show starring Lily Tomlin. (And it's one of Jane McGonigal's most formative books, too.)
7. The One and Only Ivan(*)by Kristina Applegate. A cousin just told me she read and loved a book written in “first-dog” and I recommended the “first-horse” Black Beauty back to her. For those looking for more first-animal books, I’d highly recommend this “first-gorilla” YA book by a strong, stoic, but melancholic gorilla in a dreary dead-end mall who starts wondering what life is like beyond the bars. There is a lot of scene-setting here but if you get past the first fifty or so pages the book takes off. Nicely introduces themes of animals rights to the 10-and-older-and-occasionally-much-older crowd. Highly recommended. (Just a warning: There are a couple absolutely brutal and devastating animal abuse scenes.)
8. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas(*)by John Boyne. It’s Berlin in 1942 and Bruno arrives home to see the contents of his house packed into crates. His father has just had dinner with The Fury and now the whole family is being transferred to Out-With where his father is taking on some kind of important new management position. Away from his friends and city life, he’s got nothing to do but aimlessly walk away from the house down a long chain linked fence. He meets a boy in striped pyjamas and they begin a memorably devastating friendship. Completely transfixing parable about the horrors of the holocaust packaged through innocent nine-year-old eyes. Also dark, also highly recommended.
9. The Wretched Stone(*)by Chris Van Allsburg. Are you staring at a wretched stone right now? I wouldn't have thought to call my cell phone a 'wretched stone' but thanks to Arpi and Al who both sent me recommendations to read this book after I shared the poem "Television" by Roald Dahl. Diary entries from the captain of a ship whose crew abandons reading, telling stories, and singing together in favor of staring all day at a strange glowing stone they find on an island. Bit heavy handed – I mean, the crew literally turn into monkeys looking at the thing – but for the anti-cell-phone community (shoutout! shoutout! shoutout! shoutout!) it will go down smooth. Speaking of getting rid of these bright, wretched stones we all keep in our pocket, I’m going to put mine away right now and get back to reading books. I hope you’ll do the same. Shall we hang out same time, same place next month? I'll talk to you then.
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Hey everyone,
How was your July?
I had a pretty Tarantino-y month. I rewatched five of his movies, read his new 400-page book (review below), read a couple of his formative books (one review below), listened to every podcast he’s been on, and fell into a lot of three-hour YouTube rabbit holes. I felt nervous leading up to the interview – like losing sleep and texting friends at three in the morning kind of nervous.
All that to say: I worked myself into a tizzy. It happens. I kind of like the occasional tizzy. Anyway, I’ve been told it’s my best interview. Yes, that was by my wife, and yes, I may have been fishing for a compliment. Listen yourself and let me know. Here are links for Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. (If you want to read a lot people trashing me -- which is always lots of fun -- I'd recommend YouTube!)
Also, one last housekeeping item: last month you’ll remember we sent all orders for my favorite writing book A Swim In A Pond In The Rainby George Saunders to indie bookstore Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee. Thank you! You sold them out many times over so this month I thought we’d shower some indie love on Nowhere Bookshop. They’re a San Antonio indie bookstore run by blogger and author Jenny Lawson. (Here’s my chat with Jenny.) If you want to buy any of the books below and would like them shipped to you from an indie bookshop, just click the title and you'll end up there. Btw, I take no cuts -- all profits just go to a bookstore we love. (PS. This is all an experiment! Let me know if it's working and also if you want to suggest another indie bookstore with a great site that carries widely and ships far, far away!)
Okay, are you ready to spend some of your Sunday afternoon or Monday morning together? I am! Grab a seat on the closest sofa, beach chair, or toilet and let's talk about books...
Neil
1. Once Upon A Time in Hollywoodby Quentin Tarantino. I have so much to say about this book I don’t know where to start. I will resist my urge to talk about the story and instead tell you three other things. First: the reading setting. The setting? Yeah, I mean where you are when you’re reading. This is a 400-page drugstore paperback movie novelization of an R-rated movie. So I have to say when I read it I felt like a teenager in the 70s reading something exciting and vulgar and thrilling and sultry and wild in the wee hours before turning off the nightlight. Because can I ask: When was the last time you read a drugstore paperback movie novelization? Forty years ago? Never? And yet: it totally worked to mentally transport me on another plane. (For those of you in bookselling or publishing you get the gall and gumption required in putting a book in this format at $9.99.) It felt so classic Tarantino to reinvent yet another form. I think we can add movie novelizations to the list of gangster movies, Blaxploitation films, Kung Fu sagas, and spaghetti westerns. Might this book singlehandedly lift up an entire genre? Could we all be buying movie novelizations of our favorite films in December? Maybe! Second: No moralizing. It seems like these days we often see morals placed above story. Was the person good? Did they do the right thing? Or can they become good? Can they learn to do the right thing? We live in such a “you gotta do it this way” society that if you say the wrong thing you’re quickly outcast. Well, there’s no moralizing here! And it’s so refreshing. Tarantino is a master storyteller writing in service of story alone. Characters say horrible things, character do horrible things, and they don’t necessarily grow at all – or, at least, in the ways you might expect. Some scenes may make you wince, others cause your heart to fly, but if you’re like me you’ll keep flipping because the story is just so propulsive. The swerves and curves feel like riding a waterslide. Third thing: Total geekfest. Are you a bit of nerd? Do your friends think of you as the person who could easily geek out on some inane topic for twenty minutes at the party? I feel like the answer is yes since you’re 389 words into a book review right now that you're presumably reading just for fun. (Who does that?) Well, if I'm right, you will love this book for the sheer quantity of lore. I’ve always considered myself a movie fan but after reading this book I feel I can elevate that label a little notch towards aficionado. Quentin manages to share a wobbly mirrored mix of factual and revisionist history of cinema and half the fun is trying to spot the difference. It might feel like you're being read Trivial Pursuit questions by Vladimir Nabokov. For those who’ve seen the movie, the book is different. For those who haven’t, you don’t need to. And for both, I’m going to come right out and say that, in my view, the book is better. (Don't worry: You can still picture Brad Pitt if you want to -- and he gets a lot more than topless in the book.) This is a fun and wild book I highly recommend. And I just feel so excited as a reader and book lover that Quentin Tarantino says he will spend his time after making his tenth and final film "becoming a man of letters... that's how I want to spend my twilight years." This was a very long review but if you want even more, I share my five favorite quotes from the book and get Quentin’s live reaction on them here.
2.What It’s Like To Be A Bird: From Flying To Nesting, Eating To Singing, What Birds Are Doing And Whyby David Sibley. A Northern Mockingbird swooped near my head a couple times while I was writing on a park bench this spring. It was a tough first day but I kept writing on the same bench and our friendship deepened. He walked up to my feet, performed incredible songs, and, after the first few visits, came to say hi on a low branch near me whenever I sat down. I wasn’t sure if this relationship was just in my head until I read in this book that Northern Mockingbirds actually recognize individual humans! Wow, I thought, what we had was real. Longtime readers may remember three years ago when I shared the Jonathan Franzen National Geographic cover story “Why Birds Matter.” Since then my love has deepened and David Sibley has become my birding friend. I carry his wonderful Sibley Birds East in my backpack and now I have this big, beautiful hardcover to flip through. There are so many delights in this incredible feast. Birders and aspiring birders, hear my song: Grab this book and let yourself fall even deeper in love with birds.
3. Monaby Pola Oloixarac. (Translated from Spanish by Adam Morris). I picked up this book because of the cover and then read the first paragraph on the inside front flap and got interested: “Mona, a Peruvian writer living in California, presents a tough and sardonic exterior. She likes drugs and cigarettes, and when she learns that she is something of an anthropological curiosity – a woman writer of color treasured at her university for the flourish of rarefied diversity she brings – she pokes fun at American academic culture and its fixation on identity.” I really, really loved the first half of this book and recommend it for that alone. The story motors, the writing is gorgeous, and we follow and relate and root for the cynical and cerebral Mona as she travels to a snooty literary festival in Sweden. A great first half! Sometimes that’s what a book offers and you know what? Sometimes that’s enough. We don't always need a good ending. Sure, I personally felt like the final act of this book finds the gushing plot starting to splinter into all kinds of little brooks and streams in different directions and a lot of the power was lost. But, again, it was a killer opening half and that's more than good enough. I'm excited to read other books by Pola Oloixarac which, I might add, is a pretty killer name.
4. This Is My Bookstore. This isn’t a book but rather a collection of 100 postcards of bookstores. I bought it in a bookstore because I missed bookstores and wanted to feel like I was travelling around the world hanging out in bookstores. About a quarter of the cards aren’t great – just boring exterior shots or weird close-ups of a random bookshelf – but the rest were so immersive. If you love bookshops, buy this and leave it somewhere in your house for a mental escape. I think if I was locked up in prison and could only take a sackful of items, I’d throw this in my sack. Allow your mind to wander the shelves of many magical bookshops around the world. (PS. I’m not mailing these to anyone. Purely for flip-through travelling.)
5. When The Lights Go Downby Pauline Kael. Pauline Kael was the ‘witty, biting, highly opinionated’ movie critic for The New Yorker from the late 60s to the early 90s. This book is a dense 600-page collection of all her reviews from 1975 to 1980. (She’s got a pile of other books with her other reviews.) When Quentin Tarantino was a little kid he’d go to the movies by himself and then head to the B. Dalton’s bookstore to flip open The New Yorker and see what she thought. “At the end of the day Pauline Kael is my favorite writer,” he told me. “I find her voice completely captivating … I kind of adopted her view as my own.” In an obituary for Pauline Kael (she died in 2001), Roger Ebert wrote that she "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades." There is something addictive about her reviews and many of them made me want to rush out to watch or rewatch classics from forty years ago. Hundreds of movies are reviewed in this book including biggies like Carrie, Rocky, Taxi Driver, Jaws, and Star Wars.
6. Kusama: The Graphic Novelby Elissa Macellari. (Translated from Italian by Edward Fortes.) A few years ago the art exhibit “Infinity Mirrors” by Yayoi Kusama came to a downtown Toronto art gallery and generated massive buzz. Like, lineups down the street at the crack of dawn every day kind of buzz. I went to see what the fuss was about and was blown away. (Here are a few pics.) I didn’t know much more about the artist until picking up this graphic novel. On one hand, it’s a wonderfully accessible way to get to know Yayoi (currently age 92!) and learn the history of her art in relation to her mental health challenges. She reveals, "I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live." It also details her rise to prominence in the 1960s New York City avant-garde scene. (Avant-garde as in she painted naked hippies with polka dots and ran away from the police a bunch of times.) But, on the other hand, the book only left me wanting more – the book is too light and is presented in a non-linear way with big gaps so I was left reading her Wikipedia profile afterwards and hoping for another travelling exhibition one day.
7. Fox 8by George Saunders. This is a tiny 49-page short story presented in a little hardcover for George Saunders completists. A dark, comic little fable told in first-fox by Fox 8 who has learned to speak “Yuman” and goes on an epic quest to save his pack after the “danjer” of a new shopping mall threatens to cut off his food supply. The joy of this book is the writing. How would you write a book as a fox? Well, you’d open it like this: “Deer Reeder: First may I say, sorry for any werds I spel rong. Because I am a fox! So don’t rite or spel perfect.” Short dose of magic.
8. The Prophetby Kahlil Gibran. I was simply not prepared for the sheer weight of this book. Yes, I’d heard about it forever. Yes, it’s been on my wife’s bookshelf for years. Yes, I sort of assumed that a book that’s been in print for a hundred years straight has gotta be a pretty good book. But still the “density of wisdom” in here was nearly unbelievable. A collection of twenty-six prose poems on topics like love, marriage, friendship, and time, all (fairly poorly) folded into a plotline something like “A prophet is getting on a boat to leave his hometown and a group of villagers corner him before getting on to ask him his views on twenty-six things.” Not all the poems are gems but many are and the ones that hit you will probably require you to reread them immediately. And then maybe reread them again. (If you get my Neil.blog email, you may remember I sent out a poem about parenting recently. If you don't, sign up here.) The book isn’t religious per se but it sort of feels religious and – for interest sake – when I read up on Gibran, I learned he was broadly influenced by Sufism, Islam, Baha’ism, and Maronism.
9. Beezus and Ramonaby Beverly Cleary. Did you know Beverly Cleary died this year ... at age 104!? Did you know she wrote for 50 years? Sure, Ramona only aged four years in that timespan but she holds up. I can’t say the same for the new cartoonish drawings, though. (What’s wrong with the 1950s? There’s no way Ramona’s mom has a trendy bob cut!) Don’t buy the new version for your kid like I did. It’s worth sifting through the used bookstores for a classic dog-eared version with the original drawings. So like, this version over this version is what I'm saying. And now I suddenly feel like I am book shaming people who like movie or new cartoon covers and that's kind of the opposite of our first core value so now I have no idea what to tell you.
10. Birds of Instagramedited by David Sibley. I probably wouldn’t have bought this book if my boyfriend David Sibley hadn’t written the Introduction and edited it. But, despite the title, I’m glad I did. A sumptuous feast of bird photos for people who prefer to stay off small screens. Wonderfully organized and arranged by David and a great gift for someone who’s just getting into birds. I will also point out that this book is much more global than What It’s Like To Be A Bird which focuses on birds of North America only. So prepare to be visually stunned by many of the pics.
11.The Handbook to Lazy Parentingby Guy Delisle. I’ve recommended a couple of graphic novels by Guy Delisle before, including Jerusalem and Pyongyang, but I had no idea he’s been putting out a smaller series of cartoons that can best be described as “honest tales from the front lines of parenting.” I really don’t like the title of the book but if you’re a parent, or married to a parent, who is feeling overspent, overworked, and overtired right now, grab them this book. Little cartoons include tales like when he forgot his daughter in a store, when he interrupted their homework to make them watch something on TV, or when he took over his kid's class field trip with his relentless questions. You will feel seen. (If you’re interested in talking parenting a bit more, check out Chapter 32 with Cat and Nat or Chapter 46 with Dr. Laura Markham.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Are you vaxxed? Are you double vaxxed? Are you triple vaxxed? We’re always socially distanced in this Monthly Book Club anyway.
Leslie and I just got double vaxxed up here and I’m starting to get excited to see some of you in person. So far I have trips to Nashville, Des Moines, San Diego, and Palm Springs on the horizon. Do you have a suggestion for a 3 Books guest I should interview live from any of those places?
If you aren't on the 3 Books podcast train yet, I invite you to hop aboard. We're having fun geeking out about books and the lives we’re building on top of books. I'm keeping the show 100% ad, sponsor, and commercial free (like my newsletters and blogs) so it's a place to hide from the overwhelm. Upcoming guests include Lori Gottlieb, my two-year-old son, and Quentin Tarantino. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Hope you’re hanging in there and let's get to the books,
Neil
1. The Master and Margaritaby Mikhail Bulgakov. Have you read any Russian literature? Have you read a lot? Have you read none? I had read none until 2020. Without ever flipping open a page I always considered books like War and Peace and Anna Karenina to be laughably long and assumed the writing would be thorny and impenetrable. Turns out I have made an ass out of you and me. Last June, I recommended The Duel by Chekov to you and wrote, “if you haven’t read much classic Russian literature (ditto) then this isn’t a bad way in ... it has a slowly building crescendo that will keep you flipping if you can make it through the opening dizziness." David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) gave us that suggestion back in Chapter 58 before I asked him to give us a newbie guide to navigating the Russians. He protested at first ("My knowledge is as deep as a piece of paper”) but went on to say The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov is a wonderful stepping stone into the nineteenth century Russians. Well, I bought the book right away and let it simmer and cool on my bedside table for six months. A few weeks ago I started reading it and found the first two chapters … thorny. It opens with a provocative scene in a public park in 1930s Moscow but then skips back two thousand years earlier in Chapter 2 where you're suddenly privy to the judge deciding the fate of Jesus of Nazareth. I was … thrown. When the novel settles back into Moscow it gets into its groove it starts flying. The plot summary is something like: The devil shows up and all hell breaks loose. I recommend reading the plot summary first here.
2. Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hookedby Adam Alter. Are you addicted to the Internet? Maybe a little? Maybe a lot? There is an Internet Addiction Test early on in this book which is very similar to this free one online. I scored a “Mild Addiction”. I may only be mild because I bought and read this book when it came out and heeded its call. (As an example, Leslie has hidden my cell phone, at my request, for the past week. One of many ways I try to stay off the drug.) I think we need to ratchet up our collective awareness of the zillion invisible attention hooks being stabbed into our brain by our phones all day. If you liked books like Influence by Robert Cialdini, I think you’ll like this. This was my second time through so I pulled my favorite pages and will be posting them on Instagram. (I just did this for Steal Like An Artist and The Art of Living). George Saunders told me “I feel like a circus monkey writing for social media.” He ended up deleting his accounts. I am apparently still a circus monkey which is ironic considering the book itself. Need to get that Mild Addiction down a couple more notches.
3. Tell Me About Sex, Grandmaby Anastasia Higginbotham. Gloria Steinem has a blurb on the back of this book which reads “I love that it’s Grandma giving advice. Some Native Americans say the very young and the very old understand each other best, because each is closest to the unknown.” I feel the truth in that. This non-fiction “sex ed” style book is written as an innocent, curious cut-and-paste conversation between a child (of presumably purposefully unclear age and gender) and their grandmother. Consent, sex positivity, and body curiosity are themes explored with the undercurrent motto that ‘each person’s sexuality is their very own to discover, explore, and share if they choose.” This book hit me in the gut and I think many adults will find the same. I agree with the Kirkus reviewer who wrote: “If I were independently wealthy, I’d buy a small plane, fly across the country, and drop off copies of this book to every elementary-school health and sex educator out there.” Good pairing book with C is for Consent by Eleanor Morrison or How Mamas Love Their Babies by Juniper Fitzgerald.
4. Return the National Parks to the Tribesby David Treuer. My thought process when I picked up this latest issue of The Atlantic and read the cover: “Wow, that’s a provocative story” and then “Or it’s probably that I think it’s provocative because I don’t know anything about the real issues” and then, as I started reading, “Wait, this is the history of American National Parks?” and then, once again, “I know so little about so many things” and on and on and on. I get to that place a lot. (I love that Rich Gibbons quote from Chapter 14 along the lines of "The more I know, the more I know I know nothing.") A wonderful article going deep into the bloody history and background of American National Parks to help crack open an important discussion. Right now in Canada we are having our own deep reckoning with the discovery of even more unmarked indigenous graves last week (after another discovery last month). Do you have an indigenous / first nations / first people book you suggest I read? I haven’t read much but enjoyed (and highly recommend) Halfbreed, Heart Berries, and There, There.
5. Innocent Eréndira and Other Storiesby Gabriel García Márquez. I loved this tiny, vulgar, powerful, magically real 1972 novella whose full title is The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother. (That makes up a big chunk of the book and is all I read – the rest is a bunch of his early short stories.) The magically real Yuyi Morales was assigned this book to read around age thirteen at her high school in Xalapa, Mexico. And, she perhaps shouldn’t have been? I mean, the plot deals with a heartless grandmother pimping out her twelve-year-old granddaughter to repay a debt and it doesn’t really let up. And yet: it is magical. People do things in their sleep. Oranges picked off trees reveal jewels inside. And many strange connections are made. This is the book that got Yuyi into the world of books. Just ... maybe read the plot summary first.
6. Lost In Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the Worldby Ella Frances Sanders. Whenever I trip and fall on the sidewalk my wife looks at me with big, empathetic eyes and says “pole” (prounced like 'polay') which is a Swahili word that apparently means “I’m sorry for your pain.” When she told me that I was like “What do you mean we don’t have a word for that? Come on, English! We must have this covered, right?” But, can you think of one? Probably not in one word, anyway. Well, this book is a list of dozens of words like that. The Brazilian word for running your fingers through a lover’s hair, the Italian word for being moved to tears from a story, the Swedish word for a third cup of coffee. It’s less educational and more whimsical and trivia-style but it’s lots of fun regardless. Good reminder of the language prisons we often find ourselves caged up in, too.
7. Notesby Eleanor Coppola. I am always preaching to people the way books help open up the mirror neurons in your brain responsible for empathy, compassion, and understanding. To paraphrase George Saunders – that guy keeps coming up! -- books are “empathy training wheels.” Here's Exhibit A. The book is non-fiction but reads like vivid fiction in its daily diary format. You are Eleanor, the artistic, wealthy, humble yet high society wife of Francis Ford Coppola, as well as mother of three young children, and you are living for a few years in the jungles of the Philippines while your husband shoots a gigantic movie that is stressfully running over time and over budget and which is draining and growing your family in a thousand ways. What’s the movie? Apocalypse Now. A truly formative life experience and we have Eleanor’s diaries to read throughout. I loved this book. It may be out of print but I found a used copy online and I think you can do the same. This is one of Dave Eggers’ three most formative books. (I just released my chat with Dave where we discuss life without smartphones, how to get boys to read, making art in an algorithmic society, and a lot more. Listen on Apple or Spotify.)
8. The WEIRDest People In The World: How the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperousby Joseph Henrich. I discovered a new type of Book Relationship this month whereby you buy some gigantic, dense, information packed tome that’s just chock full of wild ideas, mind-expanding charts, and (in this case) deep anthropological insight and you … adopt it as a pet. What do I mean? Well, my friend Brian texted me a picture of this book and said “You need to read this!” and I bought it immediately. I trust Brian. He has good book recommendations. And I learned that WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. But then the book arrived and it was the size of a phone book with teeny font and I was just overwhelmed. I knew the chances of me reading the book were small. More likely it would sit on my shelf forever. But, instead of either, I adopted the book as my pet. I put it front-facing on my shelf, I left it on my desk, sometimes it had a nap beside me on my bed, and a few times (no joke) I left it under my desk, by my feet. And what did I do with my pet? Did I read it? Well, not exactly. I … petted it? This metaphor may need work. Basically, I used the giant Index as my guide and kept skimming till I found a word or topic or theme or person I found interesting and then I flipped into the book and read those four or five pages. There is a lot in here about evolutionary biology, how we live, and giant macro trends around community, friendship, and kinship. In total I probably read like 10% of the book but I pulled out so many ideas, notes, and quotes already. 10% doesn’t sound like much! But it’s a lot more than nothing. Good doggie.
9. The Social Life of Forestsby Ferriss Jabr. The sub-headline on this New York Times Magazine cover story caught my eye: “Underground, trees cooperate with one another. What signals are they sending?” Sounds like a movie poster line, right? Something like 800 million years ago life sort of split into plants, animals, and the mushy middleman of mycelium. This article veers deep into the science but helps course correct that false third grade dictum that ‘trees compete with one another for sunlight in the forest.’ Turns out trees actually talk to each other through the underground network of mycelium (commonly but somewhat incorrectly called 'mushrooms') and help each other out. “Hey Big Shade! Hit me with some Vitamin D, brother!” Mycelium takes a cut for playing middleman and then what happens is … and, cut! This review is just the trailer. Read the article. It’s a roller-coaster thrill ride that will leave you on the edge of your seat. Two thumbs up.
10. A Swim In A Pond In The Rain: In Which Four Russians Give A Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Lifeby George Saunders. After a couple cameos we’re going to close out by zooming into a full feature on George Saunders. Can you tell by the picture above I lost the gorgeous, rubbery purple book jacket that this book was wrapped in? How embarrassing. Now, this is the fourth George Saunders book I’ve recommended this year alone. And it’s a doozy. Basically: Are you a writer? Do you want to be a better one? Then you must grab this book. You must! I place it on mantle alongside other writing favorites including: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and Ernest Hemingway on Writing by Ernest Hemingway and Larry W. Philips. George Saunders has been professor of Creative Writing at Syracuse University for 24 years and he’s essentially distilled his course on Russian Masters into this book. The book contains seven short stories by big sluggers like Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol and then after each one is George’s color commentary. He writes in this fast and flippy tone that’s such a rush to read. I might even call it addictive. His MacArthur Genius mind offers such deep love, kindness, and empathy for writers and readers of all stripes. It all adds up to a bit of a bible for writers. I admit I have kept it by my pillow for months now. The New York Times wrote “One of the most accurate and beautiful depictions of what it is like to be inside the mind of a writer that I’ve ever read.” The book has a 4.8 out of 5 on Amazon with 979 out of the 1164 ratings are 5-star. You will notice I didn’t link to Amazon in that previous sentence. Why? Well, I don't link to Amazon so that we can support local and independent bookstore. In my chat with George on 3 Books he said his favorite independent bookstore was Parnassus Books in Nashville, which is run by novelist Ann Patchett. I thought it’d be fun to send Ann and her team a whole whack of orders of this book. Should we have some fun? Can you wait a couple weeks before getting the book? Then click here to buy yourself a copy. Again, click here to buy this book from Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee! Looks like Ann has 10 copies in-stock right now. Let's clear her shelves a few times over.
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Hey everyone,
How’s your reading life?
I was thinking I've been slugging in mine -- dipping, sipping, going a finger deep into handfuls of books which makes me feel like I’m nowhere in anything. But then 3 Booker Jen Penn of Sandwich, Illinois kindly mailed me a copy of The Rights Of A Reader(summary poster here) by Daniel Pennac which lists “The right to skip" and "The right to dip in" on the back cover. I loved those and have since modified it to a new Value for us called "It's okay to sip, it's okay to dip." Goes well with “No book shame, no book guilt” and “Quit more to read more", I think.
So that's my message this month: Be easy on yourself. Jump around. Skip chapters. Embrace tsundoku. Let piles pile. And just get your head out of the way to keep enjoying what you love ... however you love it.
Here are my book recommendations this month,
Neil
1. Letters from a Stoicby Seneca. I know I've harped to you before about On The Shortness Of Life by Seneca and still keep a copy of the Penguin Classics version in my suitcase to help calm my mind when late-night time-zoney travel makes me anxious. (If you're also someone who feels anxious when arriving at a hotels at 3am brain-time I also recommend a lacrosse ball for wall backrubs and some eucalyptus oil for your pillow -- more sleep ideas here.) But if you want to go deeper than that essay into one of the greatest minds of all time I highly recommend grabbing this book. The fact that it’s in print and the dude lived two thousand years ago should give some indication to the quality. (Something tells me The Book of Awesome won't be talked about in the year 4000.) To give a little aperitif, here are three quotes I just pulled out from the first couple pages: 1) “Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.”, 2) “It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who hankers after more.” and 3) “Similarly, people who never relax and people who are invariably in a relaxed state merit your disapproval – the former as much as the latter. For a delight in bustling about is not industry – it is only the restless energy of a hunted mind. And the state of mind that looks on all activity as tiresome is not true repose, but a spineless inertia … A balanced combination of the two attitudes is what we want; the active man should be able to take things easily, while the man who is inclined towards repose should be capable of action. Ask nature: she will tell you that she made both day and night.” Not bad, right? I can't recommend Letters From A Stoic enough. (2000 years ago = out of copyright, so if you'd prefer it in digital cut-and-pastey form, here you go.)
2. Sideways Stories From Wayside Schoolby Louis Sacher. When Louis Sacher was a Berkeley student in the late 70s he came across an eight-year-old girl handing out flyers. He had never seen an eight-year-old handing out flyers before -- most bake sales are shoddily advertised as we know -- so he grabbed one out of curiosity. It was a local elementary school asking for college students to help at the school in exchange for college credits. He thought “No homework? No studying? I’m in.” And good thing he did. Because the students at that school inspired him to write this book. A gonzo tale of a school accidentally built sideways with each chapter dedicated to one student’s completely absurd view of the world. The book didn’t get popular until the late 80s (he worked as a lawyer for a decade till then) and that popularity timed just perfectly with me being a lonely nerdy at Sunset Heights Public School in Oshawa, Canada. (I looked like this at the time.) My librarian took pity on me and shoved this book into my hand and to this day I credit it with singlehandedly opening me up to the world of books. It's the book I’ve bought more for kids than any other. I know my own books and offshoots like this email or my podcast probably wouldn't exist without it. I feel like I met my childhood idol when I just got to sit down with Louis Sacher. Here’s a link to our conversation.
3. Mindset: The New Psychology of Successby Carol S. Dweck. “The growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others.” Want to develop one? Read this book. It'll help nudge you down the path from fixed to growth as it did for me. I’ve been revisiting books I love a lot lately – the right to sip, the right to dip! -- and have decided to set a new challenge for myself. I will flip back through a book I love, pick out my favorite pages, and post them as a series on Instagram and Facebook. A way to see more deeply inside the books I love which I can’t really do over email. (I’m guessing you don’t want a dozen photos attached to every note I send.) I admit my brain goes pretty dark when I’m on social media – I even went on the news saying cell phone addiction is the biggest issue of our time – but in my mind this is one way to focus on something positive on there without getting sucked into algorithms convincing me I’m a loser at everything. I am publicly committing here to make sure I do it. Here’s the one I recently posted for Mindset.
4. Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness To Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thriveby Kristin Neff, PhD. Yes, the word ‘women’ is in the sub-title but I feel this book could apply to anyone. Let’s take a big step back, though. Kristin Neff is the world’s foremost authority on self-compassion. This is her second book after Self-Compassion which came out years ago and has turned into a modern classic. Kristin was first to define and really empirically research self-compassion from her home base as a professor at the University of Texas in Austin and her work has been cited by other studies over 30,000 times. (!) She divides self-compassion into two buckets. “Tender self-compassion harnesses the energy of nurturing to alleviate suffering, while fierce self-compassion harnesses the energy of action to alleviate suffering.” My wife Leslie is a huge fan of her work and if the subject sounds intriguing you can go deeper on Kristin’s website here. Leslie and I also just sat down with Kristin and she’ll be our guest in Chapter 80 of 3 Books which drops on the new moon. As always: for the release date ... look up to the sky.
5. How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talkby Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish. Speaking of Leslie, here comes her monthly pick: “This timeless classic has my Mom’s name inscribed in the front. I remember seeing it on her bedside table when I was growing up. It was her parenting bible and is now mine. It is accessible (with cartoons drawn throughout), compassionate (I know my ultimate goal as a parent is to communicate to my children one interaction at a time that they can come to me forever and ever with any emotion, problem, question and I will be there for them), clear (chalk full of scripts and strategies to implement now) and best of all, the teachings REALLY work!” – Leslie
7. Inquire Withinby IN-Q. Have you ever been to a poetry slam? If so, you know how electric and intoxicating they can be. IN-Q is a National Poetry Slam champion and I’ve been diving deep into his work lately. If you get my bi-weekly Neil.blog emails you’ll have just seen his wonderful “Do You Believe In Superheroes.” That’s one of about a hundred wonderful poems in this book covering themes of love, loss, forgiveness, transformation, and belief. Some of my favorite poems include "Dear White Americans", "Citizens United" and "Look Closer." Highly recommended.
8. A Christmas Carolby Charles Dickens. How did you learn the story of A Christmas Carol? Mickey Mouse on Disney? Alvin and the Chipmunks? I picked it up from a dozen cartoons as a kid and honestly, I wish I’d just read the original. It's so much better. There’s a reason this 178-year-old (and only 89 page!) story is so heavily mimicked, parodied, and referenced. It is gut-punchy, slapstick, and will leave you in tears. One of my favorite ever first sentences, too: “Marley was dead: to begin with.” Here is a link to the full text on Project Gutenberg but I highly recommend picking it up in book form with the original drawings if you can. (PS. This is one of George Saunders’ 3 most formative books.)
9. Dreamersby Yuyi Morales. 3 Booker Karen Weissert sent me this wonderful video last year featuring a woman I'd never heard of before named Yuyi Morales reading a thank-you letter to Nancy, her old librarian in San Francisco. Turns out Nancy helped welcome Yuyi and her two-year-old son Kelly into the world of books when she became stranded in the US and didn't know anyone or speak the language. I was captivated by Yuyi, I showed it to my kids, and I bought some of her books. Most recently, I just sat down with her on 3 Books. Well, Karen, it took almost a year but we pulled it off. Thank you. I am so beyond words grateful to this incredible book-loving community and our regular literary lovefests. If you're reading this, we're friends, and I love and appreciate you.
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Hey everyone,
It feels like the world is cleaved in two again.
I’m in one of the countries where case counts are hitting record highs, shops and schools are firmly shut, and vaccine rollout is sluggish. I think a lot of us up here feel like this sheep.
Sending love and energy to those of you in a similar boat. Hang in there.
Here are my book recommendations this month,
Neil
1. The Good Little Bookby Kyo McClear. A book for the budding bibliophile in your bubble. I think you’ll love this simple picture book about a boy sent to the study as punishment. He’s frustrated and upset and then out of boredom he picks up a book -- drawn inside exactly like this book’s cover – and it completely absorbs him. “The book the boy thought couldn’t do anything did many things. It carried him to the deep sea and steered him towards a faraway land. It dazzled him and stumped him and made him laugh and gasp.” In the end, he loses the book and then later rediscovers it living a long life with other children. Will help remind you why you love reading. This book is not popular or well-known and yet: that’s kind of the point, I think. Beautiful and highly recommended. (PS. I also recommend Kyo McClear’s completely unrelated urban birding memoir about small beauty called Birds. Art. Life.)
2. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbableby Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A black swan event is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable, it carries a massive impact, and after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable than it was. (Examples are things like 9/11, the advent of the smartphone, or ‘how I met my spouse’. I was going to add ‘coronavirus’ but apparently Taleb disagrees so I feel I should defer to him). I read this book years ago and revisited it this month. It changed so much for me. I started making myself more open to black swan events in my own life. How? Try lots. More than you think you can. Put yourself in new situations. Go to parties where you don’t know anyone. Recognize the massive role chance really plays in everything and simply expose yourself to as much variety possible – create space for black swans to appear. As he writes in the Prologue: “The reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or ‘incentives’ for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many black swan opportunities as you can.”
3. The Art of Flaneuring: How to Wander with Intention and Discover a Better Lifeby Erika Owen. One of the many things I first learned from TheBlack Swan was the word ‘flâneur’. On page 21 Taleb writes “…[I] organized myself to do minimal but intense (and entertaining) work, focus only on the most technical aspects, never attend business ‘meetings’, avoid the company of ‘achievers’ and people in suits who don’t read books, and take a sabbatical year for every three on average to fill up gaps in my scientific and philosophical culture … I wanted to become a flâneur, a professional meditator, sit in cafés, lounge, unglued to desks and organization structures, sleep as long as I needed, read voraciously, and not owe explanation to anybody.” Sound good, doesn’t it? Strolling, sauntering, aimless walking, letting thoughts naturally bubble, stopping to inspect and record them as you see fit. So when one of you in our Facebook group said there was a whole book on flâneuring? I bought it right away. It sounded too good to be true! And, sadly, turns out it is. Nice premise and the sub-title and the opening chapter on history of the term was interesting but from there the book quickly devolves into a long magazine article. Like the 25-pages of the writer’s friends writing back to her email asking what inspires them to walk. Or the chapter on what to pack for a picnic. Or the chapter on ‘how to cyberflâneur’ from your home office. (Pretty sure that doesn’t work.) I am still looking for a great book on walking. Do you have one you recommend? Just reply and let me know.
4. Planet Omar: Accidental Trouble Magnetby Zanib Mian. A wonderful chapter book featuring Omar, his big sister Maryam, his little brother Esa, and his mom and dad. A fairly standard narrative about fitting in at a new school but the real magic is the gentle and accessible introduction to Muslim culture and traditions.
5. Brokenby Jenny Lawson. Do you suffer from anxiety disorder? Depression? Intrusive thoughts? Obsessive compulsive disorder? Voluntary hair pulling? Avoidant personality disorder? Any of the above? Well, Jenny Lawson suffers from all of the above. Tuberculosis too, according to her new book. This is Jenny’s third full-length book (Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Furiously Happy) and she’s now steering deeply into the worlds of mental health. Her essays rollercoaster you six different ways before exploding in endings that will leave you laughing or crying … or both. It makes sense that Jenny has become a global mental health leader through her blog TheBloggess.com and her new Nowhere Bookshop in San Antonio, Texas. Listen to Jenny and I chat about mental health and formative books on 3 Books -- here's the link to Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
6. Where The Wild Things Go: How animals navigate the worldby Kathryn Schulz. Kathryn Schulz won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for her New Yorker feature article “The Really Big One” about the potential earthquake coming to the Pacific Northwest. This time she tunes her ecological sensibilities onto the fascinating world of how animals navigate the world. An utterly absorbing read. Here’s the full piece.
7. This Is How It Always Isby Laurie Frankl. (This month’s Leslie’s Pick!) A wonderful story of Rosie and Penn, parents of four boys, as they welcome their fifth son, Claude, who quickly becomes their daughter, Poppy. As you read about their journey to support their child, questioning their parenting decisions constantly and coming back time and time again to love as the answer, it will make you reflect on the ups and downs of loving the people you love. The book gave me comfort in the fact that it's truly never easy and straightforward. This is literally how it always is. It made me laugh, made me cry, and made me feel less alone on the wild ride of parenthood. – Leslie
8. The Famous Five #1: Five On A Treasure Islandby Enid Blyton. Pop quiz! Who’s the world’s fourth most translated author of all time after William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, and Jules Verne? If you said Enid Blyton, you win. Me, I’d never heard of her – despite the staggering 800 million books she’d sold. Yet we’ve been combing the back shelves of the library lately and out popped this 21-book series. There’s apparently a lot of controversy about Enid and she sounds like a real personality – playing a lot of nude tennis and writing 50+ books a year in a subconscious stream of consciousness approach – but to me this was just a nice little chapter book to slip into. Bit of a dark turn at the end so I’d recommend it for age 8 and up.
9.The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: A Commemorative Pop-Up Bookby L. Frank Baum and Robert Sabuda. Robert Sabuda is an ‘artist and paper engineer’ who created this absolutely stunning pop-up book of The Wizard Of Oz to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the book. This is an incredibly absorbing piece of art using text from the original book and all kinds of surprises including spinning cyclones and gigantic hot air balloons. Watch this YouTube video for the full effects.
10.Goodbye, againby Jonny Sun. I first learned about Jonny Sun through a 2017 New York Times Magazine feature called “A Whimsical Wordsmith Charts a Course Beyond Twitter.” His background fascinated me: the guy had grown a half a million meme-loving following on Twitter … almost as kind of an experiment doing his PhD at MIT. A young and accomplished playwright, architect, designer, engineer, illustrator of a Lin-Manuel Miranda book, and scriptwriter for Bojack Horseman. Who is this guy??? Well, in this wonderful collection of small, delicate essays I feel like I’ve finally found out. An Asian-Canadian hyper-productive, openly-anxious, big-thinking artist with a beautifully unique perspective on issues large and small – especially those growing up amidst this constant race to produce and shine. Here are a few lines from his essay “Unnatural words” to give you a taste: “I have tried to become more attentive to words that treat natural elements of ourselves as currency: ‘paying attention,’ ‘spending time’, ‘wasting energy.’ That ‘free time’ as a concept is so natural to us means that we have told ourselves, we have agreed on the fact that, by default our time is to mean something, is to have value, to be worth something, or is to be earned. … I have tried to catch myself whenever I use words and phrases like this, but they feel so engrained in my way of thinking. It feels so expected of us to convert ourselves into currency and spenders and buyers that these words come across as entirely natural when really they are anything but. When I do catch myself, I try to use other words – ‘giving my attention’, ‘sharing my time’, ‘using my energy’ – but it feels so instinctively strange to use words that do not promise that I get something in return…” I loved this book. Jonny is my most recent guest on 3 Books. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
11.Park Benchby Chabouté. I have been sitting on a lot of park benches during the pandemic. Picnic tables, too. With coffee shops closed I’ve been working outside and developing a deeper appreciation for shared public spaces. This beautiful graphic novel tells the story of a park bench. There are no words in the entire book. Lovers etch initials, toddlers learn to walk, teenagers skateboard. As Jane Jacobs said: “By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” A quiet, beautiful, and strange book. I loved it.
12. Imagine It!: A Handbook for a Happier Planetby Laurie David and Heather Reisman. Heather Reisman is 72 years old and talks faster than an auctioneer. I am in awe of her energy and passion. When she’s not leading Indigo, one of the world’s largest bookstore chains which provides a cultural backbone coast to coast in Canada, she’s executive producing documentaries like The Social Dilemma and Fed Up and is now teaming up with Laurie David (producer of An Inconvenient Truth) to put out this accessible “how” book on environmental activism. A wonderful little guide for kids or grown-ups looking to reduce their footprint.
13. The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deathby Corrine May Botz. A wealthy grandmother named Frances Glessner Lee founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936 and later was made captain of the New Hampshire police. She had an eye for detective work and spent a ton of her personal fortune building eighteen dollhouses based on actual crime scenes. They were all built to a perfect “1 inch equals 1 foot” scale and include ridiculous details like pencils that actually write, actual correct headlines on tiny newspapers, and blinds that open and close. And the dollhouses are still used in forensics and detective training today. This book is a series of photographs of these fascinating, dark dollhouses. How did I discover this book? Well, Jenny Lawson told me to read it. It spawned a dollhouse therapy project for her as well. Great coffee table book for your inner criminologist.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everybody,
How’s your reading habit?
Do you find it waning as the weather warms? Or are you cobbling together a big pile for the summer? As always, I am being hemispherist to the Aussies, Argentinians, and Angolans, who I expect may be waxing or cobbling the opposite way. Either way, I’ve got you covered!
Btw, we are now officially up to 75 chapters of 3 Books! That podcast sprang out of this email list. A book lovers feast! That’s the goal here. Want to join us? Maybe start with Seth Godin, Angie Thomas, or David Sedaris.
And now let’s hit the books…
Neil
1. The Country Bunny And The Little Gold Shoesby Du Bose Heyward. It’s almost Easter! And if you want a perfect Easter book for children of all ages I have just the book for you. Or, rather, my wife Leslie does. Since Leslie completely nailed the interview with Brené Brown I’ve been getting many notes about her. Most are of the vein of “Can you hire Leslie to replace you as host of 3 Books? She is much better than you.” To which I reply “I’ve asked her and it’s a hard no.” But! We decided to introduce a new section to Neil’s Monthly Book Club. Now, without further ado, here is the very first ever LESLIE’S PICK. Enter Leslie: “Have you ever wondered why the story goes that Mrs. Claus just stays home and bakes cookies while Santa travels the world delivering all the presents and getting all the credit? I have. If you have too, you absolutely have to read this book. Written in 1934 (!!!), The Country Bunny is a must have for every family’s book collection (whether you celebrate Easter or not), a tribute to mothers everywhere, feminism at its finest, and an amazing way to celebrate the often thankless, always demanding, and incredibly meaningful work of raising children.”
2. How To Do Nothingby Jenny Odell. I would like to apologize to Jenny Odell for horribly judging her book by the cover. How to do nothing? On a pile of flowers? I thought the book would have the density of meringue. MY BAD JENNY! The book actually is the densest, richest, sweetest dessert imaginable. “Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing,” it begins gently, before quickly pushing you down a steep mineshaft tunnel. You gain speed as you veer into dark, twisting arguments in favor of using your attention and, really, your entire personhood as a form of resistance against our fitter, happier, more productive society. Feels like a distant cousin to the incredible Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino. Here’s a tiny (out of context) taste from Page 137: “When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to ‘be yourself’, what it really means is ‘be more yourself,’ where ‘yourself’ is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital. In fact, I don’t know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgements…” A ‘why’ book more than a ‘how’ book, I would put it in Cultural Studies over Self-Improvement. How To Do Nothing shaped and squeezed my brain the whole time I was reading it. Highly recommended!
3. The Reluctant Fundamentalistby Mohsin Hamid. I find myself rereading this novel every few years. It’s a quick read, which helps, and the style is entrancing. It’s a single conversation between ‘you’ and a stranger who approaches you on a busy patio in some unnamed foreign country. He does all the talking but seems to respond to you throughout the book. Masterful, absorbing, and builds towards a wild finish. Here is the first paragraph for a taste: “Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services.”
4. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: Edited by Eric Jorgenson. Naval Ravikant was born in Delhi, India in 1974 and moved to Queens, New York when he was nine. After graduating from Dartmouth he founded a number of startups including Epinions.com, Vast.com, and, perhaps most famously, AngelList.co. Through his popular Twitter account and appearances on The Knowledge Project and The Tim Ferriss Show he dispenses advice on (mostly) wealth and happiness in an unconventional, poetic way. As Tim Ferriss writes in the introduction: “Naval is one of the smartest people I have ever met … he is rarely part of any consensus, and the uniqueness of his life, lifestyle, family dynamics, and startup successes is a reflection of conscious choices he’s made to do things differently.” Eric Jorgenson took the trouble to sift together all the advice Naval has dispensed across years and mediums and channels and sorted it into this book. (Says he was inspired by The Almanack of Charlie Munger which you may remember was one of Shane Parrish’s 3 most formative books.) I admit I approached the book skeptically: Is this just a pile of bumper stickers for literate Silicon Valley alphas? But I found a quest for a quiet peace and contentment I wasn’t expecting. “Sharks eat well but live a life surrounded by sharks”, he says, and “Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves.” I loved the Reading section (there’s a Reading section!) including gems like: “Read what you love until you love to read”, “If they wrote it to make money, don’t read it”, and “It’s not about educated versus uneducated. It’s about likes to read versus doesn’t like to read.” I found the Recommended Reading list at the back narrow since it seemed like a dozen pages of only non-fiction books by men but I think that’s an assembly issue as I got the sense from other quotes that Naval reads much more diversely. In the end, what emerges is a set of unconventional ideas that would do great service to get passed around corporate settings (including the gems “Networking is overrated” and “There is no skill called 'business.' Avoid business schools and magazines”) all presented in a trim, choppy way. I admire how Eric and Naval made the book available completely free in ebook and audio formats with only hardcover and paperbacks sold for money. This book is definitely worth the money.
5. Notes of a Native Sonby James Baldwin. A wonderful collection of long (and occasionally long-winded) essays published in 1955 about issues of race in America, from deep class issues to simple take-downs of clichéd or problematic pieces of pop culture. (I could picture a 1950s Roxane Gay weighing in on some of these.) I read it and got the feeling that so much in the United States has changed and, holy cow, so much has not. It’s been seventy years since most of these essays were published in places like Harper’s. No surprise it’s on the Modern Library Top 100 List of Best Nonfiction published since 1900.
6. Sibley Birds Eastby David Allen Sibley. I found a tiny yellow feather in my backyard last year and texted it to my friend Alec for identification. He replied: “Moulting season, bitch!” Unhelpful as always. But then I was like wait, what’s moulting again? Who exactly do these birds think they are shedding feathers, changing colors, sprucing themselves up and down to mate or migrate? It was infuriating trying to spot a loon last fall when they’re suddenly drab and gray. Infuriating and inconsiderate! Not breeding so no need to dress up? Well, now I don’t have to worry, because I have equipped myself with Sibley Birds East, an incredible thorough -- and hand painted!?!? – set of every single bird I might come across in my half of North America. (Here’s the link for Sibley Birds Westwhich covers the other side of the Rockies. For those on other continents, what's your go-to bird book?) Every possible shade, color, and style is covered. Can’t fool me, juveniles. I see your black beak changing to orange, cardinals. Breeding, non-breeding, I got all y’all’s number now. Pairs perfectly with the Merlin ID app (which is free and run by Cornell University.)
7. Tenth of December: Storiesby George Saunders. The opening story in this book is called Victory Lap. It’s only 26 pages yet somehow builds from a disorienting opening into a final emotional wallop that will plaster your head back into your pillow while you stare at the ceiling for half an hour. I read it before bed and could feel my heart pounding faster and faster as I fell into the world of three slowly braided-together views of a horrifying scene taking place in the suburbs one day after school. After soaking it in I flipped back and read the entire thing again. Right away. I have never done that with a short story. What’s the good version of haunting? That’s what it did to my brain. I’ve read it a few more times since because I have just so rarely been this affected by writing. I agree with Junot Diaz (“Few people cut as hard or deep as Saunders does”) and Mary Karr (“For more than a decade, George Saunders has been the best short story writer in English -- not "one of," not "arguably," but the Best.”) But don’t take it from me, Junot, or Mary! Who cares about us? Read the story yourself. It’s right here. The whole thing. Thank you, The New Yorker! (#supportjournalism) And that’s just the first story in the book. Nine more doozies follow. I will also mention that in 2013 when this book came out The New York Times Magazine declared that “George Saunders Has Written The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”. The paperback features a wonderful interview between Saunders and David Sedaris which is a must read for all writers. Gorgeous, illuminating, emotionally shaking. I hope you listen to George Saunders in Chapter 75 of 3 Books which just dropped on Sunday's Worm Moon. Shall we plunge down the Saunders rabbit hole together? I expect great treasure awaits us both.
8. Warren Buffett: In His Own Wordsby David Andrews. I was hoping for a well curated set of Buffett’s best long quotes and … this is not it. Many quotes repeat themes. A lot of his best-known quotes aren’t included. There’s no index to try and look things up. Shall I go on? I’m sorry to say it adds up to something that feels like a cheap photocopying job. Read his Letters to Shareholders in the Berkshire Annual Reports instead.
9.The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonistby Adrian Tomine. I went to go speak at a local university a few years ago. They paid me money. Made posters. Sold tickets. Whole kitten kaboodle. When I arrived my host seemed nervous. I said, “What’s wrong?” and she said “We didn’t sell many tickets” and I said “That’s okay. Uh, how many?” and she grimaced and said “Six. But tonight’s the season finale of The Bachelor!” Well, I am happy to report she was actually wrong. The building’s janitor was able to end her shift early so she helped fill out the giant cavernous room. Or at least part of the first row. I took the ‘Party Platter’ of Subway sandwiches they left me in the green room out to the stage and we hung out in a circle dripping mayo all over our pants eating Cold Cut Combos. It was a humbling night but oddly beautiful, too. I thought about that night (and many others like it) while reading this new book by Adrian Tomine which catalogs the twenty years before his ‘instant fame’. I own pretty much everything by Adrian Tomine because I love his genius ability to plug into and reflect back so many invisible little cultural norms we’re all following … but maybe don’t quite realize we’re following yet. (Check out his New Yorker cover from a few months ago.) I highly recommend Killing and Dying or Summer Blonde as entry points into his stuff. And I might compare this one to Just Kids by Patti Smith. A story of an artist sharing the arduous journey. Great inspiration for makers of all stripes and many moments of odd beauty, too.
10.A Boy Called Batby Elana K. Arnold. How much do you know about autism? I know little. I have learned some from my friend Ryan, interviewing Temple Grandin (who is autistic) and David Mitchell (who has an autistic son), as well as reading The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida. I also remember hearing the line: “If you’ve met one child with autism, you’ve met one child with autism.” Depths beyond depths beyond depths I don’t and likely can’t know, but that’s why I love it when I get to experience another lens. This middle grade story about Bixby Alexander Tam (BAT) is an adult education, too. BAT lives with his sister and his mom and stays with his dad every other weekend. He doesn’t like to eat leftovers, sliced cheese, and most yogurt flavors. He has oversensitive hearing, flaps his hands, only takes things literally, and wants to call the police when his mom’s a few minutes late from her work as a veterinarian. One night she brings home a newborn skunk orphan whose mother was killed. And so the rest of the book tells the story of BAT’s quest to raise, nurture, and keep the skunk against all odds. Seems short and simple on the surface but a lot floats below. (PS Teachers, there’s a good teacher’s guide here.)
11.7 Ways To Calm Your Mind and Sleep Better. Not a book! But depending how you’re feeling these days you may enjoy this article I wrote at the start of the pandemic (aka 100 million years ago). I've been revisiting it again lately and thought I'd stick it in at the end for those who need it.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
The beat rolls on.
How’s your pandemic life?
Here in Toronto they’ve just reopened schools after another multi-month shutdown but everything else (including our beloved bookstores) remain closed.
One thing that’s been helping me is my daily #pandemicawesome which I’ve now written for 320 straight days. Feel kind of like tick marks on some crumbling prison wall but give me a sense of movement. It’s been harder to come up with awesome things lately so if you have a suggestion, just reply and let me know. You can get them on email or the dreaded socials.
Thanks as always for the love and notes. I really do read and (try my best!) to reply to each one. If someone forwarded you this email, welcome! This is a community dedicated to intentional living. It’s great to have you with us. You can sign up right here.
Shall we get to this month's book recommendations?
To the pages!
Neil
1. Team Humanby Douglas Rushkoff. Fiery, unblinking, culture-shifting manifesto imploring us – Team Human! – to come together in the face of autonomous technologies, runaway markets, and weaponized media. My mind was set ablaze reading this magnificent book beautifully organized into 100 short, powerful essays, each of which feels like it’s been simmered down into its most flavorful parts like a pot of all-day spaghetti sauce. Douglas Rushkoff is founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is professor of media theory and digital economics and known for coining terms like ‘viral media’, ‘digital native’, and ‘social currency.’ So many of you have told me you loved The Social Dilemma. Well, if you liked that, you’ll love this. I found it higher level, more informed, and a lot farther ahead on what’s really happening and what we can do about it. All backed by well-sourced Notes that constantly sent me scurrying to look up some study or article. As the sub-headline says: “Our technologies, markets, and cultural institutions – once forces for human connection and expression – now isolate and repress us. It’s time to remake society together, not as individual players but as the team we actually are: TEAM HUMAN.” This book implores us to 'find the others.' So that's what I'm doing. I can’t recommend it enough!
2. The Westing Gameby Ellen Raskin. Did you like Ready Player One? This book feels like the 1978 Newbery Medal-winning YA precursor. Samuel Westing is dead! The millionaire tycoon’s last will and testament lays out a strange game to a roomful of seeming strangers on how they can win his vast fortune. Despite the fact this book is written for “Age 10 and up”, I confess I needed to read the Wikipedia entry a couple times to understand it. Lots of hidden characters and missing links. There’s a wonderful little cultural portrait of the book by Jia Tolentino (author of Trick Mirror) in The New Yorker right here. And, finally: This is one of rockstar professor Adam Grant’s 3 most formative books. Listen to Chapter 72 of 3 Books with Adam Grant on Apple or Spotify.
3. Fauja Singh Keeps Going: The True Story of the Oldest Person to Ever Run A Marathonby Simran Jeet Singh. I’ve always felt there was a weird gap somewhere between fiction and non-fiction picture books. On one hand: Fiction! So much fiction! Saying goodnight moon from the great green room and running around with thing one and thing two. But on the other hand? Non-fiction. But really nonny-non-fiction, you know? That’s not a word but I mean it’s mostly in the vein of Wikipedia Lite with books like The Milky Way or Ants or Mother Theresa: A Nun's Life. A blow-by-blow of how something scientific works or a biography of someone famous. I often find myself more interested in the Everyman – the Vishwas the Uber Drivers and Robin the Bartenders and Shirley the Nurses of the world. Well, enter Fauja Singh! Fauja is currently 109 years old and is the oldest person to ever run a marathon. Did he train all his life? No, he began running only a few decades ago in his 80s! A wonderful true story about a skinny boy growing up in Punjab with weak legs and a strong spirit. Also doubles as a nice introduction to Sikhism which the book calls the fifth largest religion. (Wikipedia says ninth but who's counting?) A truly wonderful picture book that I highly recommend. (PS. The book doesn’t say whether author and subject are related but I suppose either way they need this T-shirt from Humble the Poet. My chat with Humble just dropped on this morning’s Snow Moon. Listen on Apple or Spotify.)
4. From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweilerby E.L. Konigsburg. Here comes another Newbury Prize-winning YA book with a twisting plot from over 40 years ago. Clearly I am on some bizarre kick! As a sidenote, for the discerning young reader in your house, I recommend bookmarking this list of Newbery Medal and Honor books from 1922 up to today. That’s a nice long HTML page and this PDF is a treasure trove. The plot of this one is two pre-teens running away from their home in Greenwich, Connecticut to hide out for a week amongst the mummies and mastodons at The Met. They do this just as a potentially-real-potentially-fake Michelangelo statue is attracting big crowds to the museum and then attempt to crack the case themselves. The writing is spare and realist and if you’re missing museums and art galleries this is a great way to visit. I will say that the title of this book makes no sense until the final act of the book so hang in there!
5. It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying is Cool Too)by Nora McInerny. In the span of six weeks Nora McInerny had a miscarriage, lost her father to lymphoma, and then lost her 35-year-old husband Aaron to brain cancer. After her blog My Husband’s Tumor and especially the Spider-Man themed obituary they penned together went viral she was approached by publishers to recount her experiences in a memoir once she had the benefit of looking back from the future. Well, she didn’t want to pacify readers with a peanut-butter-smooth story from yonder so she wrote the memoir in the six months following the series of brutal losses. While it sounds like a recipe for a tough read -- and sure, parts are -- Nora has such a sharp wit and empathetic ability to make you feel like you’re chatting about easy stuff when you’re talking about tough stuff. No wonder she hosts the award-winning podcast Terrible, Thanks For Asking (I was a guest last year) and gave the wonderful TED Talk “We don’t move on from grief. We move forward with it.” Nora is a voice I will be listening to for years. And, she even has a special book-only Instagram account, too!
6. Hadji Muradby Leo Tolstoy. I read this book while prepping to interview George Saunders for 3 Books. He said he loves it because it’s short (a 149-page novella compared to his War and Peace and Anna Karenina phone books) and yet showcases the same dazzling style of zooming way above a scene, deep down into a little detail, all while dancing in and out of minds of endless characters, many of whom appear once to corkscrew a plotline before disappearing forever. This was the first Tolstoy I have ever read (No book guilt, no book shame) and I really enjoyed it. It’s almost non-fiction, too: Tolstoy enlisted in the Russian army in 1851 and became privy to the story of Hadji Murád, a great warrior who broke with the Chechen leader Shamil and fled to the Russians for safety, thereby entering a byzantine saga of tense meetings, extravagant balls, political blunderings, and a final fatal battle. He would have had to make up a lot of scenes and what-happeneds but the story is steeped in a rich broth of truth.
7. The Very Persistent Gappers of Fripby George Saunders. Speaking of George Saunders, did you know he wrote a kids book? It’s worth watching this 2015 interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert where they discuss the book as well as sing a wonderful (and wonderfully surprising) duet. The book tells the story of small, orange, sponge-like annoyances called gappers who crawl out of the sea every night and attach themselves to the goats of the Town of Frip before being brushed off by the children every morning. What follows is a story about empathy and kindness as neighbors react differently when the gappers leave them alone and attack their neighbors. Pairs nicely with George’s 2013 Commencement Address on kindness, too.
8. Think Againby Adam Grant. I had trouble interviewing Adam Grant because my armchair expert jibber-jabbery style was – properly! accurately! – questioned by Adam at every turn. “What data are we talking about?,” he’d say, and then I’d slip into realizing I had no idea what data I was talking about. And then I realized: Wait, this entire experience is a metaphor for his book. How do you know what you don’t know? How do you examine your opinions and shoehorn yourself out of deep mental grooves? Enter Think Again by Adam Grant. As Brené Brown says on the back: “THIS. This is the book for right now.”
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Updates, updates, I’ve got updates.
First off, every January I like to remind you guys I have four mailing lists. Four! Why? I have no idea. They grew like untamed hedges. The annual reminder is so you can adjust your Neil Dosage accordingly. (I can be a bit much.) Here are the four lists; feel free to adjust.
And now, without further ado, here are this month’s books,
Neil
1. The Practice: Shipping Creative Workby Seth Godin. I cold-emailed Seth six years ago while struggling with the cover of The Happiness Equation. He replied (he replied!) a couple hours later, with a bunch of cover designs he’d personally whipped up in Photoshop. The man is a Gift Giving Machine. Whether it’s through his popular altMBA, podcasting workshop, or daily emails, so many receive counsel, guidance, and wisdom from Seth. (Here’s a big dollop of wisdom he gave me.) I have long made it a Life Rule to read any new Seth Godin book. The Practice is a wonderful contribution to his massive catalog. Read it when you need a little nudge, big nudge, or giant shove to do it. What it? Your it. That’s the deal: You choose your it and this book lights the path. It’s impossible to read The Practice and not shift your work into a higher gear. (PS. If you haven’t read any Seth Godin books, I suggest starting with Linchpin. And, I think one of his most underrated books is What To Do When It’s Your Turn.)
2. The Mountains of Mumbaiby Labanya Ghosh and Pallavi Jain. Do you feel like jumping on a plane and taking your kids to Mumbai? Or just want to go yourself? Can you already smell the frying paneer? Well, this picture book is a wonderful way to visit. Doma is a young girl new to the city and misses the mountains of her home in Ladakh. Her friend Veda takes her on a thrilling tour of Mumbai’s busy markets, crowded streets, and scenic rooftops. Busy, vivid, colorful illustrations throughout. (The book trailer shows some inside images.) Winner of the Neev Book Awards which aims to recognize outstanding Indian children’s literature. Thank you to Book Club reader Rasil Ahuja for sharing the festival with me. Are you connected to any other kids book festivals around the world? I love learning about new ones. Just reply and let me know.
3. How Venture Capitalists are Deforming Capitalismby Charles Duhigg. Do you have that skin-scratchy feeling the system is rigged and you can’t do anything about it? So do I, so do a lot of us. I love pieces squeaking open the giant democratic capitalism hood to help us understand why one rusted-out piece of metal is gumming up the system. (Roger Martin’s Why More Is Not Better is a great look at the entire engine.) Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author of The Power of Habit. In a recent issue of The New Yorker he laid the smack down on the venture capitalist industry. Insightful, alarming, highly recommended. Full piece here.
4. Farewell, Ghostsby Nadia Terranova. (Translated from Italian from Ann Goldstein.) I saw this book propped up on display at Type Bookstores (open for curbside pickup, Torontonians!) and bought it because I liked the premise and felt like hanging out in Sicily. Take me to Sicily! The premise: “Ida was thirteen when her adored father rose out of bed in their home in Messina, Sicily, and simply disappeared for good. Now, twenty-three years later, Ida is married, living with her husband in Rome, when her mother calls her home, and a mundane visit becomes a reckoning.” Pretty good, right? I guess the issue for me is that the reckoning is really of the mental variety. An inner reckoning. Not so much plot based. Dad doesn’t suddenly show up covered in seaweed with a tale of being trapped in a chest at the bottom of the Mediterranean or anything. I want to give that caveat up front in case you’re itchy for action like I was. Still, I did get to hang out in Sicily and the warm salty air magically comes through the pages. Worth reading for that alone. (Here are some pics of Messina, Sicily to warm you up.)
5. Solutions and Other Problemsby Allie Brosch. Have you been up the CN Tower? It was the tallest building in the world for 32 years until Dubai built that dang Burj Khalifa a decade back. Well, I was 1465 feet up in the CN Tower’s SkyPod with Sarah Andersen of Sarah’s Scribbles back in Chapter 8. That’s where Sarah and I talked about the formative superpowers of Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosch. (Coming in at #980!) No, not even loveable egghead Bill Gates could resist the braiding of crude Microsoft Paint drawings with deep observations of life’s rawest-edged emotions such as suicide ideation and deep depression. Makes sense that Allie’s fans were worried when she followed up her massive debut by … disappearing from the Internet for seven years. But now, finally, phewfully, we get the sequel. Thankfully Allie is alive and well but she has been through huge devastation including the death of her younger sister, a life-threatening medical condition, and the loss of her marriage. Allie knits that darkness into the pages of this memoir between absurd coming of age stories like this one. It is heavy and at times nihilistic. (I refuse to add #perfectfor2020 or some such phrase because I just don’t see it that way.) I confess I didn’t love this book as much as the original which seemed to hang together a bit better. But the gems in here really do sparkle. I hope you check it out.
6. Pastoraliaby George Saunders.Guys, I have big news. I’m in love! I don’t mean to gush but … I haven’t felt this way in a long time. Soooooooo. His name is George. No, I have no idea how old he is. No, we’ve never met. Wait, what are you trying to say? I’m telling you the fireworks are real, baby! I heard about George for years but the sparks really started flying when I read his Man Booker-prize winning novel Lincoln In the Bardo back in 2017 and it squeezed my heart. I can still feel the electricity from that book when I think about it now. I got to know George better by combing through a number of old interviews including this gem one from 2004 in The Believer where he says “I believe in efficiency, action, clarity, velocity.” Those seven short words sum up the power of the off-kilter, brain-pinching short stories (and one novella!) in Pastoralia. Suffering from Pandemic Listlessness? This book is your smelling salts. A fast-paced series of incredible stories (most seemingly based in some kind of Shelbyville contra-planet) just begging to be read faster and faster and faster and faster. I’m telling you that you must read George Saunders. You must! Just please don’t ask him to prom before me. (PS. George also has a brand new book which I am about 100 pages into and just loving. I'll share a full review here when I’m done.)
7. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnby Mark Twain. When I wrote the Values of 3 Books I made sure to put “No book shame, no book guilt!” right up front. Why? Because I have experienced book shame and I have experienced book guilt. I don’t like when someone says “Oh, have you read so and so?” and then when you say “No” they’re like “What!? You haven’t read so and so!? How have you not read so and so!? I can't believe you haven't read so and so!” I hate that. The reason nobody has read anything in the grand scheme of things is because a million new books are published a year so anytime we pick up a book we are really choosing a needle out of an exponentially expanding haystack that reaches up to the moon. Don’t fault yourself if you’ve never read some big classic everyone says you have to read. Forget them! Read whatever you want. And, yes, this is exactly what I kept telling myself as I travelled down the Mississippi River essentially as thirteen year old Huckleberry Finn two hundred years ago in the Antebellum (aka slavery-based) Southern United States. Should I have read this book earlier? No! No shoulding. I am just glad I read it today because it is magnificent. Yes, the time period feels beyond grotesque in many ways but the sheer vividness of this rousing coming-of-age adventure featuring endless popping characters sits on a mantel all its own. Ernest Hemingway said "All modern literature stems from this one book." Me and Ernie highly recommend it.
8. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change the Worldby Jane McGonigal. This book changed my view of video games. I admit I was stuck thinking of gamers as slack-jawed teens sitting on stained couches in dark basements amongst piles of Ho Ho wrappers and Slurpee cups. Play more video games? No! Get outside! Run around! That’s what I’m preaching. Well, this book gave me a splash of cold water and nudged my parenting philosophy with my young children from “No video games!” to “Let me help you pick a good video game and play it with you!” Jane says some markers of healthy video game use include constantly picking new games (to invite challenge and the learned resilience involved in figuring it out), explaining how to play it to somebody else afterwards (to provoke learning and teaching and understanding), and, finally, inviting a discussion on what the game can help us do better in real life (to avoid replacing reality with games – but rather enhancing it). While I won’t abandon my beliefs that we all suffer from NDD I have felt my arguments against video games wilt in the face of this well-researched tour de force. Jane foresees games helping us feel thrilled to start our days, increasing career satisfaction, helping the elderly feel socially connected, and tackling global-scale problems like climate change and poverty. (Her TED Talk is a great overview.) She teaches us what a game is – they all have goals, rules, feedback system, and voluntary participation – and then shares how they can lead to more satisfying lives. I loved this book. (Note: Jane is a great follow on Twitter and in advance of the 10 year anniversary of this book she shared 10 things she got right and 10 things she got wrong.)
9. Facebook is a Doomsday Machineby Adrienne LaFrance. Yes, yes it is. If we met at one of my speeches then you’ve already heard my rants on cell phone and social media addiction. (If you haven’t, here’s one I did on Canadia Teevee.) Well, this long form article by the Executive Editor of The Atlantic takes my position and doubles down on it and then doubles down on it again. Read the full piece here.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
This is the four year anniversary of this newsletter!
For the past 48 months I’ve sent you book recommendations and I plan (hope!) to keep doing it for 48 (480!) more. I send all these emails from my personal account and read every note you send back. No tech giants between us algorithming us to death. The emails are one of my favorite things. Thank you so much for your love. You have my word they will remain free and advertising free forever. If you have friends who may enjoy them, they can sign up right here.
Now, are you in frozen wintery lockdown like me or somehow frolicking on beaches south of the equator as the weather warms? We are feeling this pandemic a million different ways right now. I have been pretty stressed about it lately. What’s been helping? Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud at family dinners. The life changing magic of five-hour walks. Starting my day with two-minute mornings. Posting one #pandemicawesome thing every single day. And, of course, losing myself into good books.
Before we get to the books, I'll quickly mention Roxane Gay, Roger Martin, and Cheryl Strayed will be closing out 2020 on my podcast 3 Books. As always, new chapters drop on the exact minute of every new moon and full moon. (I don’t trust the Gregorian calendar.) Please subscribe on Apple or Spotify. And, if you're in a festive mood, please leave me a review. I read them all. Yes, even the two-star ones.
And now let's hit the books...
Hang in there everyone,
Neil
1. Voicing Changeby Rich Roll & Guests. Put simply: This is the best self-help book I have read all year. I love Rich Roll and The Rich Roll Podcast and was lucky enough to have Rich on 3 Books where we recorded live from sunny Calabasas, California. This book hits another high bar in his string of endless high-quality art. Rich has somehow distilled the collective wisdom from nearly a decade interviewing the who’s who of global guides, mentors, and visionaries down into a very tight 300ish pages. Not sure you have time to listen to seven or eight years worth of the best self-improvement podcast around? But want to? Then get this. Most “pod to books” feel like somebody from a freelance farm copied and pasted a bunch of transcripts into Microsoft Word and sent it to the printers. This is the opposite. Rich’s thoughtful, articulate essays scratch and introduce a major theme on intentional living before you then flip and find the guest’s lengthy thoughts from the show worked down into a couple pages of first person wisdom. Surprising meringue peaks throughout including a whizbanger essay from Russell Brand, a guided meditation fromLight Watkins, and two poems from IN-Q that will take your breath away. The book's not perfect. Some guests are on pedestals a bit too lofty and I would have liked a lot more diversity but, having said that, what’s most evident here is a deeply yearning soul trying, within every ounce of his ability, to create a piece of art to help illuminate the path forward. He absolutely pulls it off. This is an absolutely wonderful book. A great gift for the seekers in your life.
2. The Lives of Girls and Womenby Alice Munro. There was a media circus in Canada fifteen years ago when native daughter Sarah Polley released the incredible film Away From Her. (94% RT!) At the time I read an interview with Sarah where she said the film was based on a short story in The New Yorker by Alice Munro. “What?” I remember thinking. “How can you make a full length movie from a short story? And who is this Alice Munro?” Well, I found the short story (here it is) and read it and was just like “Oh.” It reads like a giant epic somehow reduced down into twenty pages. I fell in love with Alice Munro after that and have several of her short story collections on my shelf. The Lives of Girls and Women was new to me and I learned it was published in 1973 and is Alice Munro’s only novel ever. So it's not as tight as her later writing but the spaciousness has a unique charm to it. The characters really live, slowly, pacefully, and the stories are told in a slow tableau. The book is a midcentury Bildungsroman (always wanted to use that word) sharing stories of the emotionally hyper-intelligent Del as she navigates life from small town Northern Ontario. Wonderful to read during this time of rising anxiety and faster paced everything. I recommend it highly.
3. Mario de Janeiro Testinoby Mario Testino. I figured out a new way to travel! Find the most lush, sensuous, and immersive photo book of a place you want to visit (or revisit) and leave it on your coffee table for a few weeks. I did that with this incredible photo book about Rio de Janeiro which pulls off a three-way cross between Rio’s jaw-dropping natural beauty, its iconic arts and culture, and its deep sexual energy. The forward by Gisel Bündchen is skippable (sorry Gisel) but if you’ve been to Rio and felt the electricity of the beaches and nightlife then this book will send you back. I miss going… anywhere. Giant, immersive photo books are the new plane tickets! (Do you have a giant, immersive photo book you recommend? Please hit reply and let me know.)
4. Lord of the Fliesby William Golding. I was forced to read this book by the state at age fifteen. Looking back, I was too young to absorb all the lessons on leadership, lack of leadership, and how precariously our thin little doily of civilization really is resting over the fires and chaos below. A gripping tale of a group of shipwrecked British boys and their slow descent into anarchy. PS. Did you know William Golding wrote seventeen books and this was his first? His first!? Yes, really. And it won the Pulitzer Prize. Talk about a tough act to follow. PPS. What would you add to this Twitter string of books you read…WAY too young? I saw some people said Lord of the Flies. Mine was The Dark Half by Stephen King in sixth or seventh grade. I can still feel now how scared I was then. Big mistake.
5.False Laborby Lena Dunham. Are you obsessed with the Harpers Index like I am? It’s an incredible curated brain scramble of facts and trivia arranged to make you go “Seriously!?” over and over again. I generally flip straight there but this month the cover blared Lena Dunham’s name so on the three second walk from the mailbox to the messy pile of papers on the front table, I flipped to the article and read the first sentence. Then the second. Then the third. And I did that thing where you stand completely frozen, barely breathing, for about twenty minutes just gobbling up an incredible piece of writing. False Labor is a brave, hilarious, and vulnerable essay describing Lena's battle with infertility. All salted so perfectly with her uniquely off-kilter wit. Click here to read the full piece.
6. Love You Foreverby Robert Munsch. Children's books are so regional. Books or series that sell millions in one country are often unheard of in others. Why? Do we raise kids differently, hold different values close to the chest, or something simply lost in the translation? I would love to find a list of the single bestselling children's book in every country around the world. Love You Forever definitely tops the list in Canada with over 30 million sold. A few years ago on Canada's 150th birthday, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) even tracked down the 150 bestselling books of the past ten years. The Book of Awesomecame in at #6 andThe Book Of (Even More) Awesomecame in at #95 (woot!) but both of those actually came out the previous decade. Love You Forever clocked in firmly at #1 overall despite coming out in ... 1986. A mom rocks her son to bed every night with a lullaby, "I'll love you forever / I'll like you for always / As long as I'm living / My baby you'll be." She does when he's a baby, a toddler, a teenager, and even rigs up a ladder to crawl into his bedroom across town when he's a grown man. And in the end when she's old and frail and dying? He drives across down, picks her up, and sings the song back to her. A tearjerker that never gets old. (PS. I know a lot of you live across Europe, Asia, South America, and whatever the continent with the non-island Australia in it is called. If you know the top selling children's book in your country, please reply and let me know! I'd love to order a few.)
7.Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedomby bell hooks. Gloria Jean Watkins was born in a family of six kids in segregated Kentucky in 1952. Her father was a custodian. Her mother was a homemaker. Schools began segregated but became integrated when she was in elementary school. As she writes, under the pen name bell hooks: “School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings, that had characterized teachers and theirpedagogical practices in our all-black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us. Too much eagerness to learn could easily be seen as a threat to white authority.” This 'before and after' view of what education was and what it could be informs this slim but powerful pedagogical guide to education as a practice of freedom. A must read for any teacher or leader seeking to help classrooms or teams transgress against racial, sexual, and class boundaries. (Spoiler Alert: This is one of Brené Brown’s three most formative books. Leslie and I just sat down with Brené and our chat will kick off 3 Books in 2021. Do you like how I’m trying to just drop that in there as a casual aside and pretend I wasn’t totally freaking out about interviewing her for like a year before it happened?)
8.The Gifts of Imperfectionby Brené Brown. Speak of the devil! In my mind Brené Brown is perfect and therefore her book about imperfection is also perfect. Seriously though, this is one of Brené’s earliest books and it’s a power-packed 124 (!) pages introducing her ‘wholehearted living’ concept and 10 guideposts to getting there. Like for instance ‘Guidepost #4 Cultivating Gratitude and Joy: Letting Go of Scarcity and Fear of the Dark’ or ‘Guidepost #7 Cultivating Play and Rest: Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol as Self-Worth’. The book was published in 2010 by Hazelden Publishing, a small publisher specializing in books about addiction recovery. Leslie had it on her bookshelf for years but I hadn’t read it until now. While her voice perhaps isn't quite as strong as her later books I found it to be a wonderful introduction to her work. I think I'll begin recommending it before her others. (She seems to agree.) It just came out in a new edition, too. Also, right over here you can find a free poster of her 10 Guideposts and her incredible Wholehearted Parenting Manifesto which Leslie printed out for our house long ago. We love it. I can’t quite say we live by it because parenting is always a work in progress, but it’s a bit of a north star for us.
9.The Trumpet of the Swanby E.B. White. As far as I can tell, over the course of celebrated author E.B. White’s life from 1899 to 1985, he wrote precisely three children’s books. Two are good. One is bad. This is the bad one. Stuart Little and especially Charlotte’s Web had charm, verve, and a certain je ne sais quoi. Didn’t they? I mean, who doesn’t love Charlotte’s Web? Unequivocally un-unloveable! But this book, written when White was in his 70s, decades after the other two, was just an incredibly syrupy slog. My oldest son and I somehow kept flipping pages despite the meandering story, occasional preachiness, and gaping plot holes. The long lost unrequited love of the protagonist swan literally falls out of the sky at one point. I say skip it and go back to Charlotte’s Web which is, if I haven't mentioned it already, un-unloveable.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Hope you’re hanging in there. My reading slowed down this month. Is everything slowing down? Is time slowing down? Is time real? If you’re wading through mental molasses right now, I’m right there with you. Forgive yourself and aim to slowly steer yourself back on track. I know that’s what I’m trying to do.
Stay safe and hang in there,
Neil
1. When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiencyby Roger L. Martin. Do you feel like the whole system is rigged? Like there’s nothing you can do to really get ahead or help affect true change? This is the book to read. It masterfully zooms up into the stratosphere of the entire democratic capitalist system we live in and pulls back the curtain on all the junky, rusted-out parts inside. Roger Martin was Dean of the Rotman School of Management for a good decade and a half and named the world’s #1 management thinker by Thinkers50. I’ve followed his strategy books over the years (Playing To Win, The Opposable Mind) but I think this is his absolute best work. A clear call-to-arms calling shenanigans on, well, nearly everything, and then outlining remarkably refreshing approaches on how to fix it, all filtered into ideas for business execs, political leaders, educators, and citizens. His suggestions feel so ridiculously obvious but (of course) none of them are really happening right now. For example, for educators: Temper the inclination to teach certainty, stop teaching reductionism as if it’s a good thing (his epic takedown of MBAs here is worth the price of admission alone), help students appreciate the power of directly observable data, and elevate the appreciation of qualities (over quantities). Each point is backed by numbers and tightly screwed into lean and logical prose. Incredible.
2.Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on love and life from Dear Sugarby Cheryl Strayed. Cheryl Strayed was the victim of severe abuse as a child, lost her mother in her early 20s, became addicted to heroin, and then walked alone up the Pacific Crest Trail for three months over more than a thousand miles. Somewhere along the way she developed the incredible superpower to see inside people’s souls and conjure up potions to heal their rawest wounds. She wielded this superpower in the form of writing a pro bono column called “Dear Sugar” for an online literary magazine called The Rumpusabout a decade ago. This book is a collection of those columns and they will completely shatter you as she somehow manages to solve the question people didn’t ask her every single time. Here’s an example to give you a taste.
3. Is This Anything?by Jerry Seinfeld. No, sadly, it’s not. I feel awful saying that. I wish so badly this book was something. But it is missing a soul. Like a lot of people, I grew up with Jerry Seinfeld, watched the show religiously, quote it from memory with my friends. Even still to this day, after every speech someone comes up to me and says, “Anyone ever mention you sound a lot like Jerry Seinfeld?” What I’m saying is that Jerry lives somewhere in my bloodstream. I know I’ll own this book forever. I’ve been waiting for it for twenty-five years since his last one. And it does serve as the ultimate brick-like compendium of every single bit from one of the world’s most successful standup comedians of all time. But, that’s it. No memoir, no photos, no how the jokes were written, no lessons learned along the way, no introduction from Steve Martin or Larry David. Nothing! It’s literally just all the bits stapled together like some gigantic pile of bedside post-it notes. All climax, no foreplay, and a lingering sense of what could have been. For those who love Seinfeld so deeply, we may have to keep waiting for more.
4. The Common Goodby Robert B. Reich. Are you reaching for little ways to ground and center yourself as the pandemic wears on? I know I’m eating foods I loved as a kid, starting old TV series again from the beginning (Six Feet Under), and rereading books that give a certain fine-tuned and predictable emotional reaction. Like this one. I read it a couple of years ago and loved its calm and clear voice in the middle of all the screeching talking heads. Robert Reich lays out exactly how we went from “we” to “me” over the past fifty years and how we can get back the common good that connects us all. I can’t recommend it enough.
6. Possessing the Secret of Joyby Alice Walker. This 1992 novel is related to Alice Walker’s earlier book The Color Purplein the sense that it features a few overlapping characters. But it’s really the story of an African woman named Tashi and her inner turmoil following the ritual female genital mutilation (FGM) she undergoes as a teen. The novel is told in a poetic though at times confusing cacophony of voices that alternate every chapter like a Babysitters Club Super Special. Over 200 million women across 30 countries have undergone FGM and if you know nothing about it (like me) this heartwarming and heartbreaking novel is an accessible way in. Highly recommended.
7.HUMANSby Brandon Stanton. Are you one of the millions of people who reads Humans of New York? I was very lucky to get a digital copy of Brandon Stanton's latest masterpiece before we recorded a chapter of 3 Books. The book is his usual textured mini-life portraits offering a much needed dose of empathy and human connection. It's beautiful and I know I'll be buying a stack for Christmas presents next month.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Life is not easy right now. I hope you're finding time to get into nature, talk to people you love, and savor simple pleasures. Keep takings days or weeks off the drugs of social media, news media, and the endless brain buffet of attention-grabbing apps, games, and headlines vying for our attention in order to pump us full of ads.
Keep zooming out and focusing on the things that matter,
Neil
1.Good Talk by Mira Jacob. I have seen my books filed in Reference, Humor, Well-Being, Motivation, Self-Help, Miscellaneous, and Books With Blue Covers sections of bookstores. Different bookstores, different sections. I never realized growing up that bookstore sections are completely made up by the bookstore. There are no sections! There is no system! Everyone is just pretending that the giant mental expanses filling books can somehow be filed into neatly cropped sections that purportedly help you, the potential book reader person, find the exact book you want. But nobody knows what they want! I don’t know what I want! We don’t know what we want! And reading too narrow leads to cognitive entrenchment anyway. I am declaring the whole thing a sham! As proof, I often find phenomenal books that just don't really fit ... anywhere. That’s what happened when I found this book by Mira Jacob in with the Cartoons. This is an emotional roller-coastering true memoir that begins when Mira’s half-Indian-half-Jewish six-year-old son begins asking questions about race in America and then traverses back in time to explore deep, almost-never-spoken-about racism, prejudice, and cultural issues seen through the double lens of marriage and raising children, all presented in a hypnotic artistic collage seemingly made by Lance Letscher using some bastardized software combining Industrial Light & Magic and Powerpoint 1.0. This book caught me by surprise, twanged many emotions, and kept me reading deeply into the night. An incredible work of art that cannot be neatly filed but must be neatly read. I absolutely loved it and can't recommend it enough. (PS. If you want keep talking about finding books with elusive genres, check out my conversation with the wild Kevin the Bookseller .)
2.Just Kids by Patti Smith. A poetic portrait of starving artists coming of age in the 60s and 70s. Before Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe reached global fame they lived in poverty and occasional homelessness in the shadows of New York City. This is a book about following and following and following your dreams. Following them after your family tells you not to, following wherever they go, following them when you have nothing else, following them because you simply can’t not. A breathtaking memoir with an incredible musical pulse. I found a few moments of too much detail but the book as a whole was wonderful. (Sidenote: This is one of Brandon Stanton of Humans Of New York’s 3 most formative books. My conversation with Brandon drops on the full moon and his new book comes out next week.)
3.Mrs. Frisby and the Rates of NIMHby Robert C O’Brien. Mrs Frisby is a mouse with problems. She’s a recent widow after her husband was eaten by the cat. Her son Timothy is bedridden with a nasty chest cold. And the farmer is going to plough the field she lives on in two days which will destroy her home. Cue an epic 48-hour adventure involving flying crows, wise owls, dangerous cats, and genius rats. Completely absorbing and beautifully written. And how wonderfully rare is it for a single mother of four to be the star of the show? The back says it’s for ages 8-11 but I think we can easily stretch that up many more decades. I read this book at the suggestion of poet and activist Nikki Giovanni and while reading it I had no idea this book was turned into the movie The Secret of NIMH which I have very foggy memories of watching as a kid.
4.Trick Mirror: Notes on Self-Delusionby Jia Tolentino. This book has been following me around for the past year. Waving from bookstore windows, preening on top of big displays, I finally caved in and bought it after my friend Francesco said he loved it. Jia is a Staff Writer at The New Yorker and has an incredible knack for writing 30-page essays with more layers than baklava. She writes about the pressure to ‘always be optimizing’, about how the internet is deeply messing us all up, and about the fake history of the wedding industry. She comes across like some mix of the Oracle from The Matrix and the enlightened literate stoner ranting on a deck chair beside the pool at 3:00am after everyone else has left the party. Absorbing, entertaining, and highly recommended.
5.Devotions by Mary Oliver. Weird thing happened last month. While researching for my interview with David Mitchell I stumbled upon this great little interview he did in The Globe and Mail where he says “Next time you’re in a bookshop, see if they have any Mary Oliver. ‘Not liking poetry is like not liking ice cream.’ Mary Oliver is superlative ice cream.” I made a mental note to check out Mary Oliver later. And then I get home that same night and what should be lying on our bed? This giant book by Mary Oliver. Turns out my wife Leslie received the same recommendation a few days earlier from her friend Vicki Rivard (author of Brave New Mama). I have never been a poetry regular – finding a lot of what I stumble across too esoteric or abstract – but this book was the opposite. Nearly every poem feels like somebody is pouring clear and cold water on your heart. Simple, striking, literal language wrapped around much larger invisible emotions every time. The book is a compendium of all her best poems and offers deep reverence for nature, beauty, and life itself. A book to ground you when the media and internet swirl has you spinning way too high.
6.MeditationsbyMarcus Aurelius. Translated by Gregory Hays. Who’s translating your books? I bought the Penguin Classics edition of Meditations years ago and thought it was … fine. I know, I know, it’s the collected set of wisdom written by the most powerful person in the world a couple thousand years ago. But, yeah, fine. IT was fine! Well apparently I got the wrong one! Ryan Holiday, a bit of a Marcus Aurelius nut, told me the Gregory Hayes translation is the best. So I finally got it. And read it again. And now I see why. This set of lessons and directives to himself (never intended as a book or for publication) starts as a series of simple advice he’s trying to remember and soon evolves into an incredibly self-aware series of introspections that resonate as if no time has passed. Perfect to pair with On the Shortness of Life by Seneca which I mentioned a while back. Add it to your Enlightened Toilet Reading collection. Just make sure you get the Gregory Hays translation with the cover pictured above!
7.Your Cabin In the Woods by Conrad E. Meinecke. Do you feel like running away from it all? Here’s a perfect book to help. Back in the 1950s Conrad published two short, beautifully written books on how to build your own cabin. The pages are big, the writing is evocative, and you can let your mind fall into your invisible home away from home. Perfect coffee table / daydreaming book. This link shows you what the inside of the book looks like.
8.Hundred: What You Learn In A Lifetimeby Heike Faller & Valerio Vidali. A whimsical page-by-page look at what you learn in a hundred years. I’m sure I bought this as another pandemic escape as it offers a nice zoom out on the good times and bad times. Age 1 1/2 has a painting of a baby in a high chair while her mother crawls under the kitchen table. “Your mother sometimes vanishes. But she always comes back again. This is called trust.” Age 8 has a painting of a girl tightroping on a tall wall. “You get braver with every step you take.” Age 64 an older woman sits on a park bench waving at kids walking by. “Something draws you back to where you came from.” Age 98 has two wrinkled hands holding a caterpillar. “Sometimes you feel like the child you once were.” Scroll to the bottom here for some of the wonderful images inside.
9. How To Shoplift Booksby David Horvitz. A tiny, silly, weird art book listing about a hundred ways to steal books. One on every page. "Hide the book inside a fake rock", "Walk in the store holding a big mirror. The employees will be distracted looking at their own reflection. Hold the book behind the mirror."
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
I felt great when somebody told me that ESPN wrote a big feature today about how NHL rookie-of-the-year candidate Cale Maker is reading You Are Awesome in the playoffs bubble. I felt less awesome when I found out a serial killer in the Netflix show (Un)Well was spotted with The Happiness Equation on his bedside table.
Books for everyone!
Below are my recommendations this month.
Neil
1. Halfbreedby Maria Campbell. It is beyond shameful how little I learned in my formal education about Canada’s cultural genocide of indigenous people. Basically: nothing. When Leslie told me about residential schools a few years ago I had never heard of them. Nothing was mentioned in high school history classes and I clearly failed to do any self study. To say I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do is an understatement. I think the only books I’ve read that discuss the indigineous experience are There, Thereby Tommy Orange and Heart Berriesby Terese Marie Mailhot. And now I have this astounding coming of age memoir by Maria Campbell to add to the mix. Published in 1973 with “missing pages” detailing her rape at the hands of the RCMP, this 2019 edition has been restored with the full script as well as an Afterword written by Maria Campbell last year. The book takes place through the 50s and 60s in Western Canada and includes a lot of first nations history told through memorable exchanges with Maria’s 104-year-old (!) Cree great-grandmother Cheechum. Braided with bleakness, horror, and revelation, it’s a story I haven't been able to stop thinking about since I finished.
2. The Invisible Pyramidby Loren Eiseley. Naturists, anthropologists, environmentalists, philosophers, and teachers, lend me your ears. This is the book for you! Loren Eiseley lived from 1907 to 1977 and is listed as all of those things in his online biography. Thankfully those diverse experiences come together wonderfully in this powerful series of essays originally delivered as a series of lecture at the University of Washington in 1969. Eiseley offers a wild sense of vertigo as he masterfully zooms us across spacetime to give us a sense of place in the cosmos. Did you ever read that “Pale Blue Dot” passage by Carl Sagan? If you liked that, you’ll love this book. I think this is the book I was always hoping to find whenever I picked up A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking which I found difficult. Also great for folks who loved Sapiens or The Power of Myth.
3. Smithsonian Field Guide to Birdsby Ted Floyd. I am falling deeper and deeper in love with birds. Like madly in love. Like making-them-a-mix-tape in love. Why? So many reasons! Their earth-dominating scale (50x our population!), their wild evolutionary histories, their gorgeous plumage, their majestic flying, their gonzo behaviors. Nevermind their collective nonchalance about the pandemic. That alone is worth something! A couple years ago in this book club I shared the National Geographic cover story Why Birds Matter by Jonathan Franzen and last year I shared the urban birding memoir Birds, Art, Love by Kyo Maclear. I know it’s a pandemic cliché but I just can’t stop looking at the birds. It’s why I wrote about them 1, 2, 3 times in my new 1000 Awesome Things. I love this guide because before every type of bird there’s a page or two about its history and behavior. Helps you get to know the birds you love better.
4. Bad Feminist: Essaysby Roxane Gay. Roxane Gay’s writing flows like a river: calm, smooth, burbling, and then you hit the rocks. She offers accessible welcome mats into complex and thorny issues like her essay “What We Hunger For” on the emotional trauma of sexual abuse told through her love of The Hunger Games. (That full essay is online here.) The essays are short, easy to read, and have a huge range of topics as one moment you’re hearing what it feels like to be a typical first year professor and the next you’re discussing problematic issues in The Help or Django Unchained. Highly recommended. (PS. If you want to fall into a Roxane Gay rabbit hole I recommend following her on Twitter, reading this wonderful essay she wrote recently about her wife Debbie Millman, and checking out her reviews on Goodreads where she is the #4 (!) overall best reviewer on the whole site.) (PPS. If you’re wondering like I was how she can be so prolific, she answers here.)
5. Black Beautyby Anna Sewell. Anna Sewell wrote this book in the 1870s while lying in bed as an invalid. She died five months after it came out but was alive long enough to see the book take off. And take off it did! 50 million copies sold and counting. A wonderful first-horse view of life from the mid-1800s which includes simple but profound lessons about kindness, friendship, and animal rights. I read this to prepare for my interview with Temple Grandin which will be dropping on the exact minute of the full moon next week. (Click here to subscribe to 3 Books on Apple Podcasts)
6. Meanby Myriam Gurba. I mentioned Myriam’s sizzling essay on American Dirt last month and now I’ve read her poetic “true crime memoir.” A fiery, queer, brassy Latina coming of age in the world today.
7. The Common Loonby Terry Miller. I read this thin, road-atlas-sized book in one night and couldn’t shut up about loons for days. I sounded like this in my house. Did you know loons are the oldest flying birds in the world? (Been here 60 million years to our paltry 300,000!) Did you know they have bright red eyes to help filter out blue light so they can see prey below 15 feet underwater? Did you know due to their heavy bones and good-for-swimming-bad-for-everything-else feet they actually need a quarter mile of water just to take off? Did you know that as a result of this many loons unfortunately die each year during their fall migration to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans because they land on wet pavement slicks that look like water and then can’t take off again? Loons, loons, loons, everybody. Yes, I have gone crazy for bird books. (PS. Just for fun: This book appears to be completely out of print and isn’t even on GoodReads but I found a few copies left for five bucks each on ThriftBooks. Click fast or forever hold your peace.)
8. A Wizard of Earthseaby Ursula Le Guin. In my interview with David Mitchell on 3 Books last month I introduced this book as “A Wizard of Earth-See-Ah” to which David interrupted and said “Earth-See, Neil, it’s pronounced Earth-See.” I read the entire book mispronouncing the most common word in the book and then proceeded to make a fool of myself in front of an author I was hoping to impress. Anyway, A Wizard of Earthsea is a wonderful book classified as “young adult fantasy” but actually is about dozens of other things such as how we shape our identity, the psychology of loneliness, and how we find purpose. Poetic, vivid, raw, and rugged. I loved it. (PS. Speaking of David Mitchell, he wrote this article in The Guardian about the book. I guarantee if you read this article you'll buy the book.)
9. Life Doesn’t Frighten Meby Maya Angelou and Jean-Michel Basquiat. My cousin-in-law got this book for our kids and I found it completely entrancing. Almost 30 years ago an editor named Sara Jane Boyers had the idea to marry Angelou’s famous poem “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me” with Basquiat’s spine tingling and soul penetrating art and the results are completely transfixing. Here’s the full text of Maya Angelou’s poem if you want to read the words first.
