Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Hope you’re having a good month.
If you’re getting this it means you joined my email list sometime over the past few years through 1000 Awesome Thingsor maybe aBook of Awesomeor Happiness Equationevent. I’ve had fun sending more than 20,000 of you very sporadic updates through this email list … but they really have been sporadic. Really sporadic. Too sporadic.
I feel like inboxes are increasingly sacred spaces in our endlessly buzzing world. Think of how angry we get at spam and how good it feels to unsubscribe from seven email lists all at once. That is true freedom. I know I’m in your sacred space right now so you’ll find no handcuffs, no ads, no spam here. Just me to you. Feel free to unsubscribe below if this isn’t your thing or forward to your mom if you like it.
Why a monthly reading club? Because I love reading and so do you. You are reading this, after all. I’m in your brain right now and I’m not even there. I might be sleeping. That’s amazing. That’s reading. I love reading this much and this much and this much and this much and I feel like books are the greatest bargain in the universe. For a few dollars or a library card you can change a mind, expand a brain, share all kinds of emotions. But there’s so much out there … and we’re publishing more books faster and faster than ever before. So how do we find the gems we end up loving? I know I rely on advice of friends and subscribe to some great lists like Ryan Holiday’s Reading Email and Austin Kleon’s Newsletter which serve as inspiration for this one.
That’s the background on this new email. I’d love to hear what you think. Here goes nothing.
And now this month’s recommendations…
Neil
1. The War of Artby Steven Pressfield. I’ve been hearing about this book for years and finally read it on a flight. Absolutely amazing. A completely simple guide to battling “Resistance” – the single word Pressfield uses to describe the set of emotions and barriers preventing you from doing work you love. Within pages you’ll want to drop everything and tackle a creative project you’ve been thinking about starting. An example? This reading club email. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and The War of Art was the perfect push.
2.Black Swan Greenby David Mitchell. I’m a sucker for coming of age stories. The Fault In Our Stars? The Perks of Being A Wallflower? Sign me up. I visit lists like this often to find new ones. I think because those years are so formative I just feel the need to relive them over and over in different ways. Well, Black Swan Green is my current favorite coming-of-age story. David Mitchell had me at Cloud Atlasand this novel is just blissfully beautiful. We follow 13-year-old anxiety-prone stutterer Jason through a single up and down year in rural England in 1982. Unlike most of his other books Mitchell doesn’t shapeshift voice and characters in this one and I think the narrative voice is (somehow) even stronger as a result. Sample line: “Graveyards’re sardined with rotting bodies, so of course they’re scary places. A bit. But few things’re only one thing if you think about them long enough.”
3.The Black Swanby Nassim Taleb. If I was teaching a course in life, philosophy, economics, motivation, or psychology, this would be a mandatory textbook. I avoid pretty wide swaths of the Business section – have read too many expanded magazine articles with one basic idea on Page 150 – but this gem rises head and shoulders above the rest. The opening paragraph explains how the entire Western world thought all swans were white… until a black swan was spotted. He defines black swan events as events which 1) are disproportionately huge, 2) cannot be predicted, and 3) are mistakenly explained in retrospect with hindsight and fallacies. Examples range from 9/11 to “how you met your spouse.” The book is just absolutely exploding with ideas and reality-shattering views and carries the feeling of being written in “blue collar” language by one of the brightest economics / chaos / risk theory minds in the world. Occasionally the book can be too sprawling or chaotic seeming itself but think of this read as a wild roller coaster, not a slow and straight drive. Absolutely life changing.
4. A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers. A super quick, tightly written, emotionally suspenseful parable of modern day family tensions against the backdrop of a globalizing world. First person narrative as struggling businessman Alan Clay travels to Saudi Arabia for “the one big sale” and revisits his life up to that point. I love Dave Eggers but really hadn’t heard of this book until it was recommended to me by a great bookseller. One of his fastest reads for sure. It’s slapped with all kinds of awards like Finalist for the National Book Award and a NYT Book Review’s 10 Best. Movie starring Tom Hanks came out in April and looks unfortunately like a bomb ($30M budget, $5M box office, according to IMDB). So, as always, go with the source material!
5. Yo! Yes?by Chris Raschka. Beautiful children’s book showing how easy it is to make friends. My wife Leslie is an elementary school teacher who has been using this book for years. It’s super short with maybe a dozen pages and only a word or two per page. (Yo! Yes? You! Me? Yes, you! No fun. Oh? No friends. Oh! … Me? You? Me! ... Yes! Etc.) Really great to read and discuss with my two year old. Written and illustrated by Chris Raschka who may be more well known for his A Ball for Daisyseries and The Hello Goodbye Window.Both of those are also great.
6. Showerthoughts. Do you remember Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey? Concise, bizarre, hilarious one-liners like “The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw” or “We like to praise birds for flying. But how much of it is actually flying, and how much of it is just sort of coasting from the previous flap?” I loved those on Saturday Night Live when I was a kid and still have an old Deep Thoughtsbook. I get excited if I see a Jack Handey piece in The New Yorker. A wild and entertaining writer. And funny sidenote: Jack Handey’s has a button on it called “Is there a real Jack Handey?” Okay, where am I going with all this? Well, the Shower Thoughts Subreddit feels like our collective Deep Thoughts. When I’m in a frustratingly long line I click over to the Most Popular Shower Thoughts from the past month and always laugh out loud. One of a few sites I actually bookmark.
7. Be Preparedby Gary Greenberg. Whenever a friend tells me they’re about to become a dad I say “Congrats!” and then send them this book. Looks like a back-of-the-joke-shop flipper for that clichéd “stoopid dad.” But buried within the writing and hilarious drawings is solid parenting advice. It was the only parenting book I read cover to cover before being a dad and still flip through it. Great for any dad to be.
