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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.
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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.
