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Hey everyone,
Are you finding any time to read these days?
If yes, kudos! You're a reader. You're ahead of the pack! If not, you came to the right place. You're already reading this. The cultural push against social media and cell phone addiction is growing into a fierce tidal wave. The solution to much of what ails us? Getting outside, hanging IRL with friends, and, of course, getting back into reading books.
I read 5 books a year, tops, before I started this book club. This is one of 8 habits I use to keep pushing against our endlessly-cajoling algorithmic overlords.
You help me read more.
I help you read more.
It's a simple trade.
Let's keep at it!
Neil
PS. If you have a friend who wants to read more they can join us right here.
1. Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying The Birds In Your Own Backyard by Joan E. Strassmann. I went to St. Louis for the first time ever a couple weeks ago. I made sure to see the Eurasian Tree Sparrow (a St. Louis species!), the 630-foot-tall and 630-foot-wide Gateway Arch, and, of course, the famous Left Bank Books. Founded in 1969, it’s an incredible bookstore with the mission to ‘spark public conversation by curating an intelligent, relevant, culturally diverse selection of books.’ That they do! When you walk in there’s a giant Book Club Wall with an immaculate grid of front-facing ‘Current Reads' from a host of store-sponsored + local book clubs. They host a Gay Men’s Book Club, a Lesbian Book Club, and a Well-Read Black Girl Book Club, among many others. They have a wonderful Used / Rare Books basement with a (potentially used / definitely rare) POS system! And there is (of course) the loveable bookstore black puffy cat Orleans, who curls up in a basket under the front table. Oh! And no joke: they host over 300 free public events a year! Those are Books&Books-sized numbers. Since you are not allowed to leave a bookstore without buying a book, I wandered and browsed and asked for some uniquely local books. I ended up with ‘The Twenty-Seventh City’ by Jonathan Franzen (with the Gateway Arch on the cover!) as well as this autographed copy of a wonderful book by St. Louis author Joan Strassman, a professor at 1853-founded (!) St. Louis-based Washington University. What’s the thesis? “If you tie in the biological stories that go with the birds, they will be much more rewarding to watch.” Amen! She splits the book into chapters focusing on 'backyard birds' — Blue Jay, European Starling, Cooper's Hawk, etc. — and then goes wonderfully and meditatively deep on each one, taking us through important research that have helped us learn about their behavior (Cooper’s Hawks in BC have bigger feet than in the Midwest because in BC their diet is mostly caught in mid-air whereas in the Midwest it's more off-the-ground), showing how the birds fit into our culture (“Did blue as a color of law enforcement first come from Blue Jays?”), and then giving us tips to become better ‘slow birders’ for each species (like how to use feather color to guess the age of Starlings). A book to deepen the love of backyard birds and to perhaps help take J. Drew Lanham’s advice to us to wean ourselves off compulsive listing. 2. Wild About Books by Judy Sierra. This is one of the very best books I know to get a kid excited about reading. “It started in the summer of 2002, When Springfield librarian Molly McGrew, By mistake drove her bookmobile into the zoo.” What follows? The animals go wild, simply wild, for books, of course. “Giraffes wanted tall books and crickets craved small books, While geckos could only read stick-to-the-wall books. … She even found waterproof books for the otter, Who never went swimming without ‘Harry Potter.’” Marc Brown of ‘Arthur’ fame does the art and Judy channels her PhD in Folklore (!) into a Seussian-inspired passion for fast-paced rhymes in this delightfully energizing and reading-reaffirming romp through the wide world of books. I noticed online this book has sold over 500,000 copies. That's zillions in the contemporary kids book category! (My kids book sold 50,000.) 20 years later this book is still incredibly popular for good, good reason. Highly recommended. 3. Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport. Cal feels like a bit of a kindred spirit. He was editor of his campus comedy paper. I was editor of my campus comedy paper. He has no social media apps on his phone. I have no social media apps on my phone. He writes about deep work. I write about untouchable days. He makes books and podcasts. I make books and podcasts. Are we both banging the same drum? Perhaps merging identities? Maybe! So what is ‘slow productivity’? Cal said he first tested the phrase in a February 2022 episode of The Tim Ferriss Show and noticed it had strong resonance with the fractured-attention set. Basically, it boils down to three principles: 1) Do fewer things, 2) Work at a natural pace, 3) Obsess over quality. Sounds simple, right? Trite, even! But that’s when you raise your head and realize the world is conspiring against you doing any of these. I mean, capitalism (or perhaps what Cal coins 'pseudo productivity') tends to reward ... doing more things, working at an unnatural pace, and obsessing over quantity. This is a slim read and it’s full of lengthy deep dives on people like Emily Dickinson, Marie Curie, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, which will hopefully help charge you up to live a slowly productive life. I will add that while I’m not perfect at this I am completely into it and have been for a while. I don’t have any employees — no big team, no big office — and yet in the past 15 years I’ve put out 10+ books, 100+ podcasts, 500+ speeches, and have 4 newsletters, including the daily awesome thing I’ve written since 2008. What are tradeoffs? Lots! Small ones and big ones. On the smaller side: no social media apps, no video games, no Netflix, no ... uh, relaxing? At least it's something I've struggled with. And then, on the bigger side, at least in my experience, by not managing a team, I also, in some sense, trade impact. Scaling, growth, changing a billion lives — yeah, uh, not sure I'll get there. This book did that thing that great books do: It made me think. Helped me wonder and self-examine. Cal is swinging hard here. He's saying: "I've thought a lot about this. I'm idiosyncratic. Now lemme tell you all my ideas." I think with his growing profile as a New Yorker writer and the fact he's only 41 years old we are inching closer and closer to Peak Cal. I highly recommend his podcast Deep Questions and exploring the treasure trove of his bibliography — including long-ago written gems such as 'How To Be A High School Superstar.' Be sure to check out this wonderful book. 4. Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs. I first ‘met’ Jane Jacobs through her 2006 obituary. Now almost twenty years later I find myself increasingly drawn to her voice. In obits The Economist called Jane an “anatomiser of cities” and The New York Times said she was a “writer and thinker who brought penetrating eyes and ingenious insight to the sidewalk ballet…” She is perhaps most famous for helping thwart Robert Moses’ plans to build the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have carved up SoHo, Little Italy, and Chinatown, and then she followed that Finishing Move by moving to Toronto and … doing it again! Thwarting the Spadina Expressway which would have shredded our downtown. Jane The Double-Thwarter! When we sat down with Jeff Speck, author of ‘Walkable City’ (3/2020), we fell into a rabbit hole of Jane Jacobs quotes including one of my favorites: “By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” Well, I recently found a used copy of this book — written at age 88, one year before she died — and found it gripping. In Chapter 1 she writes that “the purpose of this book is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off ….” She speaks with giant scope and discusses cultures all hitting Dark Ages, including the Roman Empire which crumbled in the fifth century, the Islamic Empire of the eighth to fifteenth centuries, and ancient Chinese Empires that (I learned) ruled the seas 500 years ago — sending 400-foot long ships holding up to 28,000 (!) sailors to Africa decades before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. “Centuries before the British Royal Navy learned to combat scurvy with rations of lime juice on long sea voyages,” she writes, “the Chinese had solved that problem by supplying ships with ordinary dried beans, which were moistened as needed to make bean sprouts, a rich source of Vitamin C.” But then what? You guessed it: Dark age. A new political party comes in and halts voyages and dismantles shipyards. Skills are lost over a couple generations. She goes through that refrain again and again: how we can’t assume that what we have won’t slip away and how we need to actively strive to make things better. This book carries deep wisdom from your activist elder as you learn about the five key pillars of culture, and how they’re currently showing signs of decay. “Families Rigged To Fail,” “Credentialing Versus Educating,” “Science Abandoned,” “Dumbed-Down Taxes,” and “Self-Policing Subverted.” It’s dark territory, and occasionally too micro, but you can feel Jane striving, at the end of her life, to close things out with a positive finish. Clear, punchy, and with a delightful air of Marisa Tomei-on-the-witness-stand-in-‘My Cousin Vinny’ throughout. Highly recommended. 5. The One And Only Bob by Katherine Applegate. Here comes this month's Leslie's Pick! Over to you, Les: "'The One and Only Bob' has just as much emotion and humor as the first book in the series, 'The One and Only Ivan,' (8/2021) and as our 9 year old said, "I think it was a bit better because it had more adventure and less animal cruelty.” I personally preferred 'The One and Only Ivan' (bit more into rooting for a gorilla to escape captivity in a mall than rooting for a dog to find his long-lost sister in a hurricane) but this is still a wonderful book to read aloud with kids who are otherwise reading chapter books independently. There is such strong voice, subtleties that are powerful to pause and discuss, and some more mature themes, but not the even more mature ones like being an orphan, living through war, major bullying, racism, and mental health that I find riddle most chapter books for the 8-12 age group and (to me) seem more appropriate for 12-15 year olds. My favorite part of this book is that we are just both so excited to read it every night. After many nights of him preferring to read alone, I will gladly read aloud any book he wants for the time together, to have our bodies close to each other, have heart-forward discussions, and connect before bedtime. I recommend reading this with your school-age independent reader, too. Can’t wait to read 'The One and Only Ruby' next!" 6. The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel. Do you wish there was a giant plug we could yank out of the wall one day a week to shut everything down? Dmmmmmmmmm. Remote control buttons don’t do anything. Payment systems go offline. Screens all black. Maybe you hear birds chirping out your window a bit more. Sun on your skin. Look round at your family. Chat with the neighbors. Would it be that different from a few decades ago when essentially nothing opened Sundays? I grew up in the Toronto suburbs in the 1980s and it was agreed: Sunday was family day, rest day, church day, reflection day. “Gallantly, ceaselessly, quietly man must fight for inner liberty,” writes Abraham Heschel in this slim, 73-year-old interpretation and explanation of the Sabbath, the traditional Jewish day of rest from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. I like the idea. I say bring it back! “Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people.” Yes! The book is slim — 100 pages on the nose — but it’s got a thick, dense, unfurling feeling like some kind of deep-in-the-jungle fern. Heschel came to America in 1940, mastered English, and wrote this book 11 years later as a way to expand and introduce the Sabbath to a wider audience. Why? Simple: “The solution of mankind’s most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence from it.” 6. Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams At The Edge of Death Valley by Brent Underwood. I first met Brent Underwood about eight years ago when he was running a hostel in Austin, Texas. He had a strong marketing mind, sharpened from years of working with Ryan Holiday, but a calm, easy spirit — sitting in a swinging chair on a porch, pasting Polaroids on the wall, kind of daydreamy way of looking at the world. Maybe that’s why four years ago he mortgaged everything he had to suddenly … uh, buy a ghost town? In the middle of nowhere? And then proceed to get trapped there at the start of the pandemic?? And then become a big-name YouTube star? Didn’t see that coming! But I love what it’s done for Brent and the now millions of people who have followed his pilgrimage and steep personal growth curve to find and connect his place in the world with all that’s come before. I guess hanging out 900 feet below ground — where he, no joke, recorded the audio book to this memoir — will have that effect on a person. The ideas in here aren’t revolutionary but they are earnest and speak to a generation trying to find their way. Pairing personal risk, hard lessons, and online stardom may be the story of our time. A great book for millennials and Gen Zs searching, seeking, trying to find their way. In other words: lots of us! Read the Preface of the book right here. 7. The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe and Salva Rubio. This is a true and inspiring read-it-in-an-hour graphic-novel distillation of the 433-page book of the same name. Dita Kraus is the 94-year-old Holocaust survivor who, as a young girl, remarkably functioned as a stealthy underground librarian in a Nazi death camp. What do you grasp at, reach for, cling to, when someone is trying to … exterminate your culture? A horrifying question. One answer gently offered here is … books. Stories. To quietly and compassionately (and desperately) pass around ideas and wisdom, despite the circumstances, in spite of the circumstances. This book rings hard today. I was thinking about what little I truly know or understand about what’s happening in the Middle East right now. In the past five months over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed. 30,000!? (Source) The UNICEF executive director just said “We haven’t seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world.” (Source) Horrifying to contemplate, even despite the circumstances that led to these atrocities. How many stories are being lost? How many will never be told? The authors and illustrators have done a wonderful job balancing many interlacing storylines while being extremely compassionate, careful, and sensitive with the complex material. Highly recommended. 9. There is no 9! Just an update. I've been working with the TDSB for years on cell phone policies. TDSB is the Toronto District School Board, the largest school board in Canada and the fourth largest school board in North America with 238,000 students. After speaking with them in 2018 I recommended a Zones, Modeling, and Fasting idea to address the growing pervasiveness of problematic cell phone use. I was then asked by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) to speak to the country on national TV about what I considered 'the biggest problem facing Canadians.' What did I talk about it? You guessed it: Cell phone addiction. Then I was invited back to speak to all Principals and Vice-Principals again last summer and before I spoke I was told "We aren't contemplating a policy change at this time." It's hard to think about policy changes at that level! There are so many variables and so much pushback and policing. But, I'm lucky, I was ... external. So I went onstage and ... called for policy change! I asked Principals and Vice-Principals, for the sake of their students (and my kids who go to TDSB!) to ban cell phones from schools. Many Principals did it on their own in the absence of a higher-level policy. Grassroots! Bottoms up! Then I began working with the Chair and Director on a blanket policy for the board. We were largely drawing on the excellent work by Jon Haidt who has been publishing incredible stuff on his After Babel Substack for the past couple years. (Here's me hanging out in Jon's kitchen talking about this and formative books.) Now, the latest is I'm reading Jon's brand new ‘The Anxious Generation’ which just came out Tuesday (and is #4 overall on all of Amazon ... though I got my copy from my local indie Type Books) and the TDSB has just announced a $4.5 billion lawsuit against Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat. The tide is shifting! We know cell phones are dangerous. Let's raise the social media age to 16! Let's ban cell phones from classrooms! Let's avoid smartphones before high schools! Brains only get one change to develop. Let's keep pushing ...
