These are my favorite books I read this year. I hope you find one or two you like.
Happy holidays,
Neil
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19.The Common Goodby Robert B. Reich. Think of a beautifully safe small town where nobody locks their doors. Now imagine the first person who comes through breaking and entering. Pretty easy pickings! Nobody locks their doors. Trust plummets. Arms race erupts. Locks. Security systems. Video cameras. This type of trust evaporation and arms racing has happened everywhere and Robert Reich gives an incredibly lucid portrait of exactly what happened when to get us where we are now. I call it trust, he calls it the common good, but either way, this is a vital read to help understand the world we live in. (Sidenote: One of my highlights of 2019 was giving a SXSW talk with Frank Warren called “Building Trust In Distrustful Times”. I used this book to develop some ideas in that talk.)
18. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderlandby Lewis Carroll. I read this book as a child… and stopped. I didn’t like it. I read this book as a teen… and stopped. I didn’t like it. I read this book this year… and couldn’t stop. I loved it. Proof a book has to catch you at the right time. My whole life I thought Alice was a children’s book and … it’s not! The twisted references, complex mind games, and crazy absurdism are deliciously adult but baked into simplistic prose. But just because something looks like vanilla pudding doesn’t mean it’s not crème brûlée, you know what I mean? There is so much layered complexity here. Did you know Lewis Carroll was an Oxford-educated mathematician? Just read this section on Wikipedia about the style, themes, and allusions in this book. A hundred pages of bliss. Hope it catches you at the right time.
17. Little Fires Everywhereby Celeste Ng. A picture-perfect family in Shaker Heights, Ohio is slowly peeled back to reveal all sorts of spaghetti-noodle machinations on the inside. You will feel love, you will feel pain, and (best of all) you feel yourself rubbing against bigger ethical questions that will make you wonder “What would I do in that situation?” A book that will bubble in your blood. (PS. Get it before they ruin the cover ... set to debut as a mini-series starring Reese Witherspoon in 2020!)
16.Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cryby Mildred D. Taylor. LikeLittle House in the Big Woodsby Laura Ingalls Wilder, this is an autobiographical scenescape book. It tells the story of a young black girl growing up in rural Mississippi in the 1930s and serves as a deeply immersive vitamin for growing empathy. Characters pop, dialogue crackles, and it reads like an action movie with the constant acceleration to the finish. I finished it in the middle of the night and then let out a huge deep breath. (Sidenote: This is one of The Hate U Giveauthor Angie Thomas’s three most formative books.)
15.Savage Seasonby Joe R. Lansdale. This book felt like a Quentin Tarantino movie. Two loudmouth, straight-talking friends down in the Texas countryside get sucked into a bumbling plot to find some lost money and everything goes horribly wrong. Fast-paced action, snappy dialogue, and a constantly swerving plot. You’ll feel dizzy and satisfied at the end. And like a Quentin Tarantino movie, it’s definitely Rated R. A great book to escape into another world.
14.Birds Art Life: A Year of Observationby Kyo Maclear. A fragile, unique, small memoir of discovering urban bird watching while wrestling with middle age. On its surface, this book seems … strange. A memoir of urban bird watching? But there’s more here. Portlandia co-creator Carrie Brownstein says “We’re living on a million tiny stages. Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube. Dinner plates are showcases for our food, beds become venues for our slumber, selfies are curtain calls for our faces.” And as Kyo writes in this book “our economic growth model that assumes if you make something small (unless it is boutique and artisanal, and thus financially large or monumentally miniature), it is because you are somehow lacking and frail.” That is simply not true. We need to reject that idea as our world amplifies into 10x-ing everything, moonshots, and scale. This is a quiet, meditative book about life’s tiny beautiful things. A grounding perspective reset when the world feels too big.
13. P Is For Pteradactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Everby Lushlife akaRaj Haldar. A is for Aisle. E is for Ewe. T is for Tsunami. And below each beautifully illustrated drawing is a tricky, head-scratching sentence. Like for the letter T it says: “The charging tsunami washed away all of Tchaikovsky’s tchotchkes.” The world is never what it seems. This book pulls up that curtain nicely for children.
12.Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Windowby Tetsuko Kuroyanagi. This is a non-fiction book that feels like a fairy-tale. Originally published in 1981 in Japan (where it sold nearly 5 million copies in its first year) it was finally translated to English thirty years later. Kuroyanagi was one of Japan’s most popular TV personalities for decades and this is a memoir of her childhood of joining a completely unconventional school near Tokyo during World War II. If you believe that trust and control are inversely related (like I do) you will love this book. You can read it as an innocent story of an unconventional childhood or a prickly indictment of the entire factory-style education system.
11.The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychologyby Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett. Years ago I was watching an NFL playoff game when they flashed a graphic onscreen that stuck with me. They showed two quarterbacks, drafted the same year, with the same type of college cred. One of them had one head coach on one team over his entire career and had been a huge success and won a handful of Superbowls. The other had the pleasure of playing under something like a dozen coaches across half a dozen teams. And guess what? Pretty much zero success. And we all hail the first guy as a hero! Best quarterback of all time! But is he? Is it really the person that we can objectively see here? Or is it the situation? What if I told you that when you perceive the actions and intentions of others you are pretty much mostly wrong? You do what we all do! You overvalue the person. And you undervalue the situation. This is a Big Idea book that will reorder how you look at the world. It will lay out the fallacies, assumptions, and leaps of logic you are constantly making. And it will do so in a kind, warm-hearted, empathetic, grizzled old professor type of way. It feels like you are sitting in a great college class. (Sidenote: This is one of Malcolm Gladwell’s three most formative books. Our 3 Books chat is right here.)
10.Meanwhile: Pick Any Path by Jason Shiga. Did you like Choose Your Own Adventure books when you were a kid? If so, you’ll love this post-modern graphic novel with 3856 story possibilities (seriously!) all told through images and rampant flipping between pages. It’s head-twisting, it’s frenetic, it’s mad-scientist, but if you’re into puzzles or games (or your child is) then this is for you.
9.Comedy Sex God by Pete Holmes. I try to read across as many genres as I can but one genre that’s been largely missing is the Celebrity Memoir. It’s not that I don’t like celebrities. It’s not that I don’t like memoirs. It’s just that I don’t like the celebrity memoir. Why? I guess I’m cynical about them. The book often feels part of a larger marketing plan cooked up in a Hollywood boardroom. Somebody’s having a moment! And so there’s movie billboards, an 8-episode podcast, a Vanity Fair feature, and, yes, a crappy book. Why do I go on this rant? Because Pete Holmes (Crashing, Dirty Clean, You Made It Weird) is a celebrity. And this is a memoir. But it’s not a celebrity memoir. It’s an incredibly well-written and hilarious coming-of-age story from a comedian at the top of his game. This book comes at you fast with a lot of uncomfortable moments and Pete’s unflinching honesty. The book talks about (yes) comedy, sex, and God because everything Pete does is underpinned by this gigantic gnawing “What is this?” feeling that we should really have about the whole universe. What is the universe? Why is it expanding? Expanding into what? Why are we here? How did we get here? What happens next? These are huge questions most of us put out of our mind to get through the day but Pete keeps touching and tapping up against them in this beautiful book.
8.Lessby Andrew Sean Greer. When writer Arthur Less gets an invitation to his ex-boyfriend’s wedding he decides to accept a slew of half-baked authorly invitations around the world rather than shamefacedly attend as the awkward dateless former lover. What follows is an incredibly hilarious and woven tale through distant countries. First off, it feels like you are visiting everywhere he goes. How does he pull this off so well? You’re in Morocco, you’re in India, you’re in Japan. You’re traveling. You’re right there. You feel it. Second, it’s hilarious and laugh-out-loud maybe sorta like Barney’s Version or A Fraction of the Whole or Catch-22. And, finally, the finishing move: the entire book is written by an eloquent first-person-floating-over-the-scene narrator whose identity isn’t revealed until the final pages.
7.The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers. In the mid-80s, near the end of his life, famed professor and mythologist Joseph Campbell (Hero With A Thousand Faces) sat down at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch to record a six-hour PBS special exploring his ideas on religion, spirituality, symbolism, our connection to the planet, our connection to our past, and our existence in the universe in one super long conversation with journalist Bill Moyers. This book is a transcript of that conversation. Hugely mind-expanding with ideas about how we make sense of our world and what’s really below the surface of everything we see.
6.The Night Ridersby Matt Furie. This children’s book has zero words in it … and is probably the book I read most often to my kids all year. What’s it about? Well, uh, okay, there are these two friends, a frog and a mouse, and they wake up in the middle of the night, eat some bug cereal for breakfast, and then walk out of their mushroom house, click open their garage door opener, and then hop on their bikes to go on a wild, fantastical, totally absurd late-night adventure featuring scary-not-scary dragons, a secret underground computer lab, and some dolphin surfing… all before finding a cliff to watch a beautiful sunrise at the end of their all-nighter. A wild night out without going out. Completely provokes the imagination because there are no words so your kids make up all the dialogue and plot details.
5.Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized Worldby David Epstein. I think one of the ugliest things in the world today is the polished resume. Polished LinkedIn profiles! Polished everything! Too much polish. I like blemishes. Blemishes are interesting. Weird jobs, strange hobbies, gap years. Have you read Jordan Peterson’s bio? Regardless of what you think of the dude, talk about an interesting resume. When I interviewed candidates at Walmart I was most interested in those gaps and rough edges and the stuff painted outside the lines. Because that’s where the person had come from, how they grew, how they developed. Crucible moments where their character was forged. I think the increasing specialization of our world, at younger and younger ages, results in far too much fragility. Cognitive entrenchment! Being really great at one thing often means you’re pretty bad at lots of things. The jack of all trades is the next king of the world. A powerful book for those feeling wobbly in their career, wondering what’s next, or for anyone thinking all the tiny things they’ve done don’t amount to much. Actually, they amount to a lot. This book shows you why.
4.Howard Stern Comes Again by Howard Stern. Howard Stern has essentially taken his forty years of hosting a daily morning show, chiseled away 99.99% of his interviews, and shaped the remaining few dozen into this exquisitely beautiful carving. Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Poehler, Ellen DeGeneres, Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, and so many others let their guard down, ditch the talking points, and let the conversation bloom into vulnerable, revealing, and hugely insightful discussions offering an endless platter of illuminating insights on motivation, artistry, habits, and relationships. And if you’re interested in learning how to be a better interviewer then you’ll gain a ton here, too. Howard sounds like a guy hanging on the barstool beside you but in this book he reveals his deep preparation method and you get to watch it in action.
3.Don’t Touch my Hair by Sharee Miller. How do you teach children about boundaries? Read them this book. A wonderful story about a girl named Aria who has big, bouncy, curly hair that everybody wants to touch. After she has a big scream one day (“Don’t touch my hair!”) she learns that people need to ask permission to touch her hair and that she can feel confident saying yes or saying no. Pairs well with C is for Consentby Eleanor Morrison, which I also loved.
2.Ernest Hemingway on Writing by Larry W. Phillips. I currently have this book in the gold medal spot on the writing book podium ahead On Writing by Stephen King (silver) or Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (bronze). Ernest Hemingway thought it was bad luck to talk about writing. So he didn’t! Or he thought he didn’t. But twenty-five years after he died journalist Larry W. Phillips combed through Hemingway’s personal letters to friends, editors, fellow writers, and critics, as well as interviews he conducted over his career, and pulled out the many wise and remarkable thoughts Hemingway shared on writing over his life. He then sort of shaped and sculpted them together by theme (“Working Habits”, “The Writer’s Life”, “Characters”, etc.) to produce this slender 140-page volume of endless nuggets. I circled so many quotes and made so many notes in the margins that I just ended up leaving it on my bedside table when I was done in the hopes that it will slowly merge into my subconscious. A gem for anyone that writes and wants to write better.
1.Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Day of the War on Drugsby Johann Hari. I didn't put an official ranking beside my top books this year but if I was forced to then this would probably take top spot. An incredible book just stuffed to the brim with big ideas and big characters. Do you think drugs should be illegal? Which ones? Why? What happens when they’re not? What happened when they weren’t? Who made them illegal? Why? And what happened when they did? It turns out that precisely zero of the answers to these questions are obvious. This is a massively illuminating and mind expanding exploration of our relationship with drugs. Everyone should read it. It is at once a detailed history of the drug war, a buddy-beside-you-on-a-bus account of one man’s obsessive across-the-world dive into the abyss of the war on drugs, and a series of hopeful stories full of compassion and love that will honestly surprise you as you’re crying.
