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Hey everyone,
We’re closing in on another year.
As Toronto nights get colder and darker I’m really noticing the toll of the past two years. Living inside the pandemic’s emotional envelope has been draining and heavy. Some days just feel like molasses.
It was in that goopy emotional state that my distant college friend Mat texted me out of the blue last week to tell me his dad Andy had suddenly died of a drowning accident. Just horrible news. I've never met Andy but felt like I had. He was a member of this community since the beginning and often wrote back to my Book Club emails with feedback, suggestions, and recommendations. Later in our exchange Mat wrote "He felt strangely close to you via email" ... and I paused on that. Because, well, I feel strangely close to all of you, too. I guess if you've read my books or emails for a while, you already knew that.
The obituary Mat and his sister wrote made me cry. If you feel like briefly connecting with a stranger who read every single one of these book club emails up to this one, you can read it here.
It’s the post-Thanksgiving swoon down south and as a Canadian I’ve been enjoying all the gratitude flying around Twitter. Normally Twitter is a rabbit hole of endless emotional pain but this time of year there are some really nice strings like this one.
What am I thankful for?
This community.
I really have no idea why you’re reading this. Did you get The Book of Awesome as a Christmas present ten years ago? Give one to a teacher? Are you a Cover To Cover Club member of 3 Books? Hear my Google Talk on The Happiness Equation? Get You Are Awesome in your company’s orientation package? Watch me on the news two days ago? Or maybe your great Aunt Linda forwarded you this email because she forwards you three dozen emails a day and you just started reading it and you really have no idea where you are right now.
Well, however you got here, let me just say you made it to the right place.
Thanks for hanging out for a monthly chat about books.
This month’s book club is dedicated to Andy Balez.
Neil
1. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Do you realize in the late 90s it was apparently not uncommon for a magazine to send a freelance journalist to just, you know, climb Mount Everest? And come back and write a story about it? It happened! Outside Magazine sent Jon Krakauer to climb Mount Everest and report on the growing commercialization of the mountain. He ended up being intimately close to one of the greatest Everest disasters of all time with eight people – including the leaders of both tour companies he was following – dying over a dramatic few hours at the summit. Jon wrote a massive 17,000 word article in the September, 1996 issue of Outside (check out thegripping cover) and then expanded it into this book the next year. An extremely straight-faced thriller (I don't think there is a single exclamation mark in the book) with twists and turns and plenty of provocative questions around decision-making under stress and leadership in crisis. I know a business school professor who uses it this book in class. And, it really does feel you’re climbing Everest when you read it. Highly recommended.
2.Book of Longingby Leonard Cohen. There’s a wonderful music shop in Toronto called Sonic Boom and they have a small masterfully curated book section in the corner. (I once walked out of there with Lincoln in the Bardo, The Tao of Wu, and a Choose Your Own Adventure. You can check out their online bookstore here.) Anyway, I was there last week glancing at this book on a table. A twenty year old book of Leonard Cohen poetry? I knew nothing about it. But then the two women browsing next to me looked at my book and started gushing. “Oh, I love that book!”, “Oh me too, it’s one of my favorites!” I was surprised but even more surprised when they actually started quoting some of the poems. I learned Kendall was marrying Kennedy’s brother and they’d flown in from Vancouver and Calgary for wedding dress shopping. I got intrigued with the poems and asked them to dog-ear all their favorites and I suddenly ended up buying a book with a couple dozen poems marked by two strangers. As we say in our Values: Good things happen in bookstores. How are the poems? Strange, sharp, occasionally confusing, often delightful. (I agree with a New York Times blurb on the book saying: “Book Of Longing has exceptional range. It is clear yet steamy, cosmic yet private, both playful and profound.”) Here’s the poem Thousands – one of my favorites so far:
Out of the thousands who are known, or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts trying to look like the real thing. Needless to say I am one of the fakes, and this is my story
3. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Bodyby Roxane Gay. (Trigger warning: This review talks about sexual abuse.) I was very nervous to interview Roxane last year. (I'm sure you can tell.) I prepare for my interviews by setting myself an unachievable goal: read everything the person I'm interviewing has ever written plus read everything that’s ever been written about them plus read their three most formative books. I love living in somebody else’s psyche for couple weeks but rarely make it further than where ten or twenty hours takes me. But when I interviewed Roxane I spent much, much longer and came up much, much shorter. Where do you begin? Her thousands of Goodreads reviews (where she’s often the most popular reviewer on the whole site), her trove of Medium articles, her “Work Friend” New York Times column, her prolific Twitter feed, or, you know, her actual books. So many books! She’s written novels and edited poetry and even written Black Panther: World of Wakanda. I read and really enjoyed her essay collection Bad Feminist last year but it took me a lot longer to finally start Hunger. And once you start this book? There is no turning back. An incredible window into a young Haitian-American woman from an upstanding family coming of age in 70s and 80s Omaha, Nebraska ... and feeling many kinds of hunger throughout. In the beginning the book appears to be about food and weight. She opens Chapter 3 by saying "At my heaviest I weighed 577 pounds at six feet, three inches tall” but then we are taken deeply into her horrifying teenage rape and many zig-zagging challenges that follow. She has an economical “Hemingway on Twitter” style of writing that reads very fast and addictive once you fall into it. I often talk about research showing that fiction completely absorbs us into another identity and helps grow empathy, compassion, and understanding. This book absolutely does the same. Here’s a paragraph from the last third of the book: “Sometimes, I get angry when I think about how my sexuality was shaped. I get angry that I can draw a direct line between the first boy I loved, the boy who made me into the girl in the woods, and the sexual experiences I have had since. I get angry because I no longer want to feel his hands on my desires. I worry that I always will.” Emotionally shaking, highly recommended.
4. The Birds of Americaby John James Audobon. I found this massive book of bird paintings in a used book store last month and left it on the coffee table where it’s great flipping through with the kids. Completely mesmerizing realistic hand-drawn paintings of hundreds and hundreds of birds. I know little about James Audobon and the Audobon Society and it seems his life really only still getting colored in. The book is stunning – costing over two million dollars in today’s money to make and taking over fourteen years of field observations and drawings in the early 1800s. The copy I found was a 1950s reprint. A feast for birders with often ‘life sized’ paintings of hundreds of birds. Contains at least a half dozen birds that are now extinct including the Carolina parakeet, Passenger pigeon, Labrador Duck, Great Auk, Heath Hen, and Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. (Or is the Ivory-billed extinct???)
5. The Americansby Robert Frank. After World War II Robert Frank emigrated to America and spent time in the early 50s travelling across the country capturing an outsider’s view of his new homeland. The Guardian describes this book of simple black-and-white photos as ‘perhaps the most influential photography book of the twentieth century.’ There is a photo of three skinny black men in black suits, bow ties, and straw hats leaning on a shiny black car in a grassy field with the simple title “Funeral – St. Helena, South Carolina.” There is a poofy-haired middle-aged redhead in a sleek one-shouldered dress leaning over a craps table in a dark room under a bright hanging light with the title “Casino – Elko, Nevada”. There is a long black-and-white marble counter with stools crammed full of twentysomething white men sipping drinks underneath giant cardboard ‘Orange Whip 10 cents” signs over their head with the title “Drug store – Detroit.” So much more than meets the eye in every picture and a book you’ll flip through again and again. Jack Kerouac writes in the introduction: “Anybody doesnt like these pitchers dont like potry, see?”
6. The Camping Tripby Jennifer K. Mann. I think I was probably twenty-four when I first went camping. Overnight camping, I mean. I’d been to camp sites, I’d been to camp grounds, I’d even stayed in the occasional cottage in the bush and roasted marshmallows for the full, you know, camp-like experience. But I never really went camping. My Indian immigrant parents weren’t much help on the outdoors. My dad never built a fire, my mom never pitched a tent. Who had time to go camping between extra clarinet practice and math club? (I can see my parents laughing while reading this. Actually, my mom laughing. Pretty sure my dad deletes all my emails. Hi mom!) Anyway, you might see why I loved this book sharing the story of (younger than twenty-four-year-old) Ernestine going camping for the first time. I could relate to her fear of fish in the lake, feeling like her feet are hurting on hikes, and being scared and up all night in the tent. I could also relate to the awe of seeing the biggest tree you’ve ever seen, making your first campfire s’mores, and the awe of staring into the endless stars at night. A wonderful book.
7. The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry. Dave Cheesewright was my boss for four years when I worked at Walmart. He's the retired former CEO of Walmart International and maybe the most exceptional corporate leader I’ve seen in action. (He was the basis of many, many stories in The Happiness Equation although I couldn’t name him at the time.) He told me The Little Prince was one of his three most formative books and I just had fun revisiting it. The book is short! Only 16,534 words on 125 pages. And I discovered it is the third top-selling book of all-time! (Go ahead and guess which two books you think are above it and then click here to see if you were right.) An astoundingly dense mass of accessible wisdom with drawings Saint-Exupéry did himself throughout. Incredibly tragic-ironic (what’s the word for that?) that the opening scene of this book – a pilot crash-landing his tiny plane in the desert – was essentially replicated by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry himself who crash landed in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Occupied France July 1944. His body was never found and a remnant of his plane only discovered in 2003. The Little Prince has been translated into 300 languages for good reason and, if you’re still not convinced, here’s the entirety of one of my favorite chapters in the book -- Chapter 13 – coming to us courtesy of some dodgy 1994 Angelfire page. That’ll give you a taste of the rest.
