Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
It’s been a long September and I try to believe that maybe this year will be better than the last.
I have now passed 500 straight days writing one daily pandemic awesome. I post them daily here and you can get them over email, too. I also released a podcast with my two-year-old and one with incredible puzzler Jason Shiga whose mesmerizing book I revisited below.
And now let's get to the books...
Neil
1. Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint For Work That Makes You Come Aliveby Jonathan Fields. Podcasts were exploding in 2016 when I went on book tour for The Happiness Equation. Knowing nothing about podcasts except “they’re popular!” I said yes to every request I received. I did maybe a hundred podcasts and burnt myself out. I was running way too fast and now when I look back the only podcast I actually remember doing was Good Life Project with Jonathan Fields. It was live! That was the first difference. I went to an address in New York and was surprised it was … residential. I was welcomed in by a gentle, mild-mannered, deep-eyed guy named Jonathan who made me a cup of tea and then invited me into his studio. We went deeper and further than I had in other interviews. Jonathan is that kind of person. Deep, far -- and always serving. He has a wonderful big-hearted community and, perhaps because of the wisdom he exudes, the question he's been asked by them, more than any other, is 'What should I do with my life?' Well, he’s spent years thinking about it and put together a new assessment tool called Sparketypes which is designed to help people ‘find the work that comes alive.’ The book just dropped and it’s a really beautiful aid for people looking to find their best self at work. It's got the 'key takeaways!' part of a traditional business assessment tool (like MBTI or StrengthsFinder) but there's a lot of heart and soul in it embracing the grey. Here's a cool trailer Jonathan put together and his chat on The Rich Roll Podcast just came out, too. And, maybe most importantly, here's the link to the free Sparketype assessment online. (I'm a Maven / Maker. What are you?) Highly recommended.
2. The People In The Trees by Hanya Yanagihara. Mrs. Dorsman sat us down on the green carpet on our first day of third grade. “Where did you go this summer?,” she asked. "I went on a road trip to California and I went to Rome and I went to Tokyo … and I went to Antarctica … and I went to the moon!” Puzzlement set in before the big reveal a couple seconds later. “THROUGH BOOKS!" Did your third grade teacher say something similar? I think most of us have heard a variation of ‘books are places’ but I admit I hadn’t thought about it in a long time until I read The People In The Trees. An absolutely stunningly detailed visual feast of a novel that completely transports you into the dense jungles surrounding a lost tribe on a remote South Pacific island. The novel reads completely like non-fiction. I flipped back to the front a couple times to confirm it was a novel. It opens with some Reuters and Associated Press wire articles explaining how 71-year-old Nobel Prize winning scientist Norton Perina has been charged with sexual abuse of a minor. You then meet the first narrator – Norton’s buddy Ronald – who explains he’s painstakingly collected Norton’s handwritten memoirs from jail – the shocking true story! -- and is publishing them for you here with his added preface, epilogue, and detailed footnotes throughout. There are a lot of things happening in this book all at the same time which results in a kind of fast-pulsing-beats-over-slow-strings type quality. Narrator reliability, big questions around globalization, science, and anthropological ethics, and sharp prose that constantly guts and illuminates. When Norton heads into the jungle he says “A creature, its malachite-dark back diamonded with scales, skittered across my feet, a wraithlike monkey shrieked from a tree…” Then: “Around me the jungle hummed, a low, ceaseless buzz, as if the entire island were some sort of mysterious appliance plugged into an enormous yet invisible energy source.” Later: “There were so many shades and tones of green – serpent, aphid, pear, emerald, sea, grass, jade, spinach, bile, pine, caterpillar, cucumber, steeped tea, raw tea." Illuminating, right? But it's gutting, too. After revealing his mother died of a brain aneurysm he writes “… I pictured it often, all but heard the soft explosion as the artery burst, saw the coil of soggy, flaccid tissue, the black blood staining the brain the shining, sticky red of pomegranates.” Haunting, hopeful, smooth, sharp, tender, fierce. A long and slow big deep breath of a book.
3.The High-Five Habitby Mel Robbins. Five years ago I flew into Vegas early and caught the speaker onstage the day before me. It was Mel Robbins. I was amazed watching her zap the room like a lightning bolt. I mean, she had a big room full of accountants in crisp dress shirts laughing, crying, and standing up in their chairs. Accountants! It was magic. She distills messages down to their most simplified versions imaginable – and then somehow simplifies them again. She's not a pretender and serves from a place of deep humility. That's one of her many superpowers. (Here’s a few of her others.) Since I met Mel she’s gone on to host a TV show, become Audible’s most listened to audio personality, lead a massive online community, and now has her first book coming out in five years. What’s it about? High fiving yourself in the mirror. No, I’m not joking. Actually high-fiving yourself in the actual mirror. Sounds beyond trite, trivial, and eye-rolly. But, the weird thing is, it actually works. Have you heard the research around smiling when you get up? Saying I love you to yourself? Making eye contact for thirty seconds? There’s a lot out there and, sure, many of us have Stuart Smalley sketches floating through our heads but, I say, in this day and age, with an endless barrage of spam designed to bait and hook our attentions while simultaneously making us feel horrible about ourselves and emptying our wallets, well, all we really have for sure is ourselves. So we better figure out how to treat ourselves well. This book helps you do that.
4. Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick, a book chosen by the teacher, community leader, and mother of four boys I am lucky to be married to. Over to Leslie: “A mentor of mine once told me that it’s impossible for the human brain to be curious and judgmental at the same time. Maybe it’s partly for this reason that Neil and I have always agreed that one of the most important values we want to foster is curiosity. Bodies are Cool does just that. It really is the best book I’ve read encouraging all types of body positivity and inviting children and parents into a safe space to connect over curiosity of different bodies, discuss their own personal preferences, and (maybe) better understand their own expressions of themselves. Catchy rhyming text and popping illustrations with incredible body diversity leads to endless launching points for discussion. It’s hard not to dream of a world where every child grows up thinking this way about their body and everybody else’s!"
5.The Righteous Mindby Jonathan Haidt. I think it was my friend David Cain, author of one of my favorite blogs Raptitude, who first suggested I read Jonathan Haidt. Since then I have picked up three of his books, listened to him on a lot of podcasts (Dax Shepard, Joe Rogan, Jonathan Fields, Sam Harris) and have come to see him as one of the most fascinating and fearless thinkers around. When I picked up this book I had no idea what the title meant and the first few phrases in the book – moral psychology, moral minds -- didn't help. But eventually my slow brain started catching up and I began vibing on Jonathan’s (very quick) wavelength. Things started falling into place. Part 1 of the book explores the idea that "intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second" (he has a wonderful 'elephant and rider' metaphor around our conscious and subsconscious minds -- little video here), Part 2 that "there's more to morality than harm and fairness", and Part 3 that "morality binds and blinds." This is a big book which zooms way up and over the majority of conversations we are having today. It reads something like the source code behind a lot of society's ugly social ills and it's no wonder Jonathan's formed wise thoughts way back down the ladder rungs on things as diverse as income inequality, peanut allergies, and social media. As Jonathan said in an interview with Ezra Klein: “We’re trying to build a diverse, secular, tolerant, peaceful society.” This book is a big cinder block dropped into the foundation of that build. Challenging, eye-opening, and well worth the effort. I know I'll be revisiting it again and again.
6. Meanwhileby Jason Shiga. When I was a kid ‘game books’ were massive with Choose Your Own Adventure books selling almost half a billion copies. They were so simple, enticing, and a wonderful complement (and antidote) to video games. Well, this is a wild contemporary book by pure mathematics whiz and puzzle genius Jason Shiga. You play the role of a small boy going out for ice cream but soon your day slips into all kinds of splintered pathways involving mad scientists, time travelling machines, and all with (of course) the fate of the world at stake. Chances are very good you will die. Chances are also very good you will enjoy dying and then just start again. Head-twisting, frenetic, wonderfully wild. I really feel like this book really deserves a wider audience. Especially if you have any hard-to-wrangle-into-reading people in your house. Jason Shiga was also my guest in Chapter 87 of 3 Books which just dropped on last week’s Harvest Moon.
7. Planet Omarby Zanib Mian and Nasaya Mafaridik. A fairly new middle-grade chapter book series featuring Omar, his older sister Maryam (who knows 28 surahs of the Qur’an by heart), his little brother Esa (who mortifies his brother by blowing his toy whistle during dead silence at the mosque), his mom (a scientist who wears a hijab and drinks a lot of coffee), and his dad (also a scientist, rides a motorcycle). The book is a simple story about moving to a new town and being nervous about going to school but laid across a thoughtful and generous introduction of Muslim culture and practices. It’s over 200 pages but magical design makes it a fun and fast read. The book came out as The Muslims in the UK three years ago and has won a slew of awards.
8. 111 Places In Toronto That You Must Not Missby Anita Mai Genua, Clare Davenport and Elizabeth Lenell Davies. Are you starting to rediscover your hometown? Maybe even getting on planes again? It’s good to get back out there as things open up. I feel like tourist books are a nice re-entry point. I confess I’d become a bit of a Toronto snob – knowing where to go, what to do, what to see. But no! I have been humbled by the many gems in this wonderful book that were new to me. In an era of infinite choice the value of curation skyrockets. And this book is masterfully curated towards “accessibly odd” -- from a residential home covered in dolls to leftover brick walls of our notorious insane asylum to the oldest tree in the city to original Banksy's now entombed in plexiglass downtown. Do you have a really good “accessibly odd” guidebook to your hometown? I feel like the good ones are really good in this little sub genre so please reply and let me know.
