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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.
