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Hey everyone,
It's hot and drippy in Toronto and I've been thinking again about what it means to live intentionally and at a more human pace. I just wrote a new post about escaping the algorithm and revisited the wonderful 'Team Human' by Douglas Rushkoff as you'll see in the reviews below.
I also spent time this month with wonderful souls in new places. One goal we've had for 3 Books since we started six years ago was tapping into street smarts—street wisdom!—from everyday people like bartenders, variety store owners, Uber drivers, and nurses.
In that spirit I just released a This American Life-ish conversation on 'bullets, bruises, and babies' with three people I met driving around St. Louis and also spoke this week to a room of 6500 ICU and ER nurses in Denver. Stretched to the brink in a broken system I heard tales of heartbreak, overwork, and overwhelm on the front lines. It feels more important than ever we keep talking to each other—through books, in-person chats, and any rich veins of conversation we discover on our own journeys.
I hope this monthly book club—coming to you the last Saturday morning of the month for 90 months in a row now—can be a rich vein for you as it has been for me. Reply anytime to let me know what rich veins you're trusting and relying on in your own life these days.
And now—let's get to the books!
Neil
1. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. See if the opening paragraph of this debut novel by Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar grabs you like it did for me: “Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do-over. Clarification. Lying on his mattress that smelled like piss and Febreze, Cyrus stared up at the room’s single light bulb, willing it to blink again, willing God to confirm that the bulb’s flicker had been a divine action and not just the old apartment’s trashy wiring.” The first third of the book flew by for me in a wonderfully told story of a wannabe-writer in Indianapolis whose mom died in a senseless military-trial-gone-wrong type of plane explosion over the Persian Gulf and whose dad skirted by in America killing chickens on a factory farm. What happens after the first third? The book got … heavy. Akbar started weaving in all kinds of chapters from new perspectives: Cyrus’s mom’s lesbian encounters in the 80s, dream sequences with Rumi, and little bits of Cyrus’s novel-in-progress throughout. Still, I recommend this book for the sentences. So many glorious sentences. Akbar clearly chipped away at it for a long time as it has a Steve Toltz 'A Fraction of the Whole' (2/2023) style of wordy acrobatics. And, I will add without giving anything away, the book does 'pay off' nicely in the end.
2. Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff. I’m in a Douglas Rushkoff mood lately. I just wrote about him in a new blog post and revisited our conversation in Chapter 83 of 3 Booksbefore pulling his wonderful 2019 manifesto ‘Team Human’ off my shelf. This book has the force of a train. A fiery, breathless, culture-shifting manifesto told in 100 tight, short essays, which I learned he modeled after the wonderful ‘Finite and Infinite Games’ (8/2022). It all ultimately adds up to a takedown of “the antihuman agenda embedded in our technology, our markets, and our major cultural institutions" and, for me, is a reminder to "find the others" and seek out deep human connection in the face of an increasingly anti-human world. We need Douglas’s voice right now. Check out his podcast Team Human, his eponymous Substack and, of course, this wonderful book. Highly recommended.
3.Figuring by Maria Popova. “How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?” That’s a question that comes up early in this book and it sort of umbrellas over everything Maria Popova puts out—from this book to her live sciencey-poetry Universe in Verse events to her wonderfully 18-year-running, flowering-in-all-directions site The Marginalian (formerly called Brainpickings). In this book she zooms up a level and tells a fascinating history of arts and science told through deeply engaging and endlessly braided tales of the artists and scientists themselves. They’re not linear stories, though, because as she writes: “Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of ‘biography’ but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams.” So we get many-sided diagrams of figures like Johannes Kepler, Maria Mitchell, Rachel Carson, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, told with an entrancing spell of Maria’s particular brand of poetic narrative with endless snips and clips of letters, speeches, and writings weaved in. I love the posture of this book. It's like Maria herself: fiercely intelligent, deeply humanist, very… macro-orthogonal. Maria has often called literature “the original Internet” and her ability to dive deeper and wider than anyone else is on full display here. The book gave me wonder, perspective and, like everything Maria, a great deal of heart.
4. SmithsonianField Guide to the Birds of North America by Ted Floyd. I have a lot of field guides “to the birds.” My favorites are my hyper-regional 'Birds of Ontario' (6/2020) and the completist masterpiece 'Sibley Birds East' (3/2021). But I have a lot of others: guides for places I want to visit ('A Guide to the Birds of India, Pakistan, and Nepal'), guides I’ve received as gifts, and even a wonderfully water-stained copy of Roger Peterson's ‘A Field Guide To The Birds’ which Leslie’s grandmother left me. (Side note: I recently learned Peterson is credited with starting “field identification,” like as a thing, with the original 1934 ‘A Field Guide To the Birds.’) If you’re new to birding, you need a field guide. If you’re new to field guides, it’s easy to take J. Drew Lanham’s advice and grab one at a second hand shop. The birds don’t change—even if their names may soon! So what is it about this field guide that I love? Photos! That's it. This one has photos. Every single other field guide I have has drawings or paintings, but this has over 2000 photos of all 730 North American species! A must-add to the field guide collection.
5. It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health by Robie H. Harris and illustrated by Michael Emberley. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick! Over to Leslie: “What I would give for a landline in the kitchen and cable TV in the living room over this technologically-charged-matrix our kids are growing up in!! One area we're trying hardest to protect our kids from an ‘internet education’ is sexual education. I remember learning so much about how my body, hormones, emotions, and relationships were changing from books my Mom got me and so I’m trying to do the same for our kids. This book is geared to children 10 and up and gives details about both male and female puberty, how to understand strong feelings and sexual desires, why it’s important to talk to your doctor about sexually transmitted diseases, laws around abortion and the importance about talking about sexual abuse. It even dives into how to get information AND stay safe on the internet. If you’re thinking these topics feel too advanced to discuss with your 10-year-old, as someone who teaches health to elementary school students, I’m here to tell you they’re not. My best advice is to start the sex conversations early and just keep them short and sweet. Many tiny honest questions grow into bigger conversations and help keep the doors open. From the same authors, there is ‘It’s Not The Stork’ (for 4 and up) and ‘It's So Amazing’ (for 7 and up). If you need inspiration on what to talk about when, check out this resource. If we wait until the teen years it’ll be harder and more awkward for everyone and our kids will likely look somewhere else like (ugh) unsafe corners of the internet. So, if you have a 10 to 14-year-old and want to dive into giving a sex education at home, reading this together is a great place to start.”
6. ‘What A Major Solar Storm Could Do To Our Planet’ by Kathryn Schulz. A few weeks ago a friend of mine who lives in suburban Ontario sent our grouptext pictures of the Northern Lights…from his backyard. He’d never seen them from his place before but it was the same day as that news report surfaced warning people of a “solar storm.” What’s a solar storm? Exactly! What is a solar storm? I had no idea till I waded into this epic 8200-word New Yorker feature from Kathryn Schulz which helps explain. Basically, five years ago FEMA made a list of possible disasters and found that only two could simultaneously affect the entire nation. One is pandemics (they nailed that one!) and the other is a severe solar storm. Schulz reminds us that “the sun is an enormous thermonuclear bomb that has been exploding continuously for four and a half billion years” and whose inner workings we’re only figuring out now. She tells a compelling history of notable solar storms throughout history (all before our now-susceptible power and satellite grids were in place) through the profile of the “space-weather forecaster” Ken Tegnell. A great primer on an issue that feels soon-to-be-frequently-discussed.
7. Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads by Gary Greenberg and Jeannie Hayden. Before we had kids Leslie read a pile of parenting books. Me, I read … just this one. Somebody passed it along and the opening spread made me laugh. (Click the pic on this page to see it.) On the left: “What Your Newborn Won’t Look Like,” with a drawing of a cuddly, giggling 3-month old baby and, on the right, “What Your Newborn Will Look Like,” with a dark, crying newborn with labels like “cone-shaped head from squeezing through the womb,” “lanugo—fuzzy hair on face, back, and shoulders. This will eventually disappear,” and “skinny, structurally unsound legs.” I have bought so many copies of this book and passed it along to any dad-to-be. It’s so eminently readable and has a lot of tidbits and advice I used for months and years after. The book divides up the the first year of baby and 0-3 months includes topics like “Coping with Crying,” which explains how to tell between six different types of cries, “Wrestling The Breast Pump,” and “A Guy’s Guide to Strollers.” By the time you get to 10-12 months there are advanced topics like “Babies and Restaurants,” “Advanced Changing”and, my favorite, “The Decoy Drawer.” Greenberg writes: “Somehow the baby senses the power your electronic gear possesses and will take every opportunity to seize and/or destroy them. You decide to buy the baby colorful plastic versions of their own but, of course, the baby immediately throws aside the imposters and goes back to the genuine articles. That’s why you need to create a decoy drawer full of old phones, remotes, wallets, keys, and credit cards. The drawer should be at a good baby height and all items need to be real but non-functioning. That way when baby opens the drawer they think they found the mother lode.” Surprisingly rich with a light and funny tone throughout.
8. City Parks: A stroll around the world’s most beautiful public spaces by Christopher Beanland. Have you heard of ‘The Crane Index’? It’s a construction industry-produced metric to track the number of active cranes in 14 major cities across North America. Guess what city is number one and has been for years? My hometown! Toronto’s skyline is currently dotted with 221 operating cranes. To put that in perspective numbers 2, 3, and 4 on the list are LA with 50, Seattle with 38, and Calgary with 20. “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” sang Joni Mitchell in ‘Big Yellow Taxi,’ and sometimes walking around Toronto these days you can almost feel the grass screaming. It was in that spirit I picked up this gorgeous visual escape into the greatest, grandest, grassiest city parks around the world. Organized by continent, the book gives lush 2-4 page spreads of each park along with a quick view of each from strong voiced globe-trotting park lover Christopher Beanland. When I first cracked open the book I checked my home country for credibility. There are precisely two Canadian parks in the book: Stanley Park in Vancouver and Mount Royal in Montreal. Biggies! Not a single park from Toronto but maybe that’s just how high the bar is here. Central Park in New York, Millennium Park in Chicago, Griffith Park in LA, that’s the scope of things. Here’s a snip of Beanland writing about Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, Japan, one of the few in the book I’ve actually visited: “Cemeteries are the most obvious examples of parks dedicated to death, but many memorial and peace parks dot the world too. Hiroshima’s brings together a collection of formal landscapes and tranquil gardens to memorialize that which was the opposite of both of those things: horror and slaughter on a previously unimaginable scale. But the language is telling: this is a Peace Park where the catastrophe of the atomic explosion of 1945 is seen as a warning to future generations, that the way and weapons of mass destruction must be avoided. Contains modernism museums and sculptures surrounded by lawns and trees. A mound at the centre contains the ashes of tens of thousands, peace bells toll to remind us, and the miraculously surviving A-Bomb Dome stands as a kind of monument to a human spirit that could not be crushed.” A wonderful coffee-table book to zoom us out of concrete jungles.
