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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.
