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Hey everyone,
Happy April!
The world is tilting away from social media. Can you feel it? It feels good. It feels so good.
Let’s get to the books!
Neil
PS. If you’re new to book club, sign up right here.
1. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt. Do you remember when nobody had cell phones? You’d spend half an hour at dinner trying to remember the name of that guy from that movie. You had to actually whistle at the corner of the street to get a ride home. And, my favorite, you just never knew where anyone was—pretty much ever. Pre-tracking, pre-surveilling, pre-obsessing-over-your-kids-whereabouts. Then twang! Culture snapped backwards. Partly because of the well-catalogued rise in the 1980s of 24/7 news and fear-based child abduction stories to hook us to the screens. Ensuing protectionism was accelerated by smartphones, then a pandemic, and now: we got issues. Higher than ever anxiety, higher than ever depression, higher than ever loneliness. If we’re not careful we’ll end up like that scene in WALL-E, riding our fat ships, sipping soylent, while being endlessly titillated by total entertainment forever. But once in a while, once in a moment, a culture-defining book shows up at a culture-defining time to pull us back from the brink. To pull us back from fully hard-wiring ourselves into the matrix. That book is the wonderful ‘The Anxious Generation’ by NYU professor and brilliant thinker Jonathan Haidt (pronounced "height"). Yes, I said as I read this book, yes, yes, yes, yes. This is it! A deeply clear, deeply researched, deeply, dare I say, obvious clarion call for no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, entirely-phone-free schools, and a callback to open play for our kids instead of programmed safe-robot childhoods. (Jon even does a three-page photo spread on the value of old, dangerous playground equipment. His rant on rusty merry-go-rounds was speaking my looooooove language.) I love this book. I think you should buy it. By the dozen! By the skid! I am writing right now at my local coffee shop with the book sitting beside me and so far three people have come up asking me about the book. It’s hitting the zeitgeist hard—bang!—right when we need it most. Two people have just flipped through the book reading some of my highlights and I’d love to invite you to do the same. Here is part one of my highlights. Here is part two. I might post another. The whole book will be yellow soon! I just love Jon’s thoughts in here and, TBH, I think they could be stronger. I think a smartphone—like, access to the entireunfilteredworld of anything and everything—should be age 16 not 14, so I’m arguing for eleventh grade not ninth grade as he is proposing. (Cal Newport agrees, btw.) But let’s start somewhere! This book delivers many things including a much-needed slap to the face of tech companies who inadvertently, then advertently, began messing up our kids. Started innocently! On page 3 Jon writes: “… in 2008 my two-year-old son mastered the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone. Many parents were relieved to find that a smartphone or tablet could keep a child happily engaged and quiet for hours. Was this safe? Nobody knew, but because everyone else was doing it, everyone just assumed that it must be okay.” But then, looking back from years later: “Companies that strive to maximize ‘engagement’ by using psychological tricks to keep young people clicking were the worst offenders. They hooked children during vulnerable developmental stages, while their brains were rapidly rewiring in response to incoming stimulation. This included social media companies, which inflicted their greatest damage on girls, and video game companies and pornography sites, which sank their hooks deepest into boys.” Wait, did they know what they were doing? They did! On page 227 Sean Parker, first president of Facebook, says “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” and then goes on to share how he, Zuckerberg, Systrom et al “understood this consciously. And we did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our children’s brains.” On page 230 Jon shows us Zuckerberg’s market-based approach. He writes: “In August 2019, I had a video call with Mark Zuckerberg… I told him that when my children started middle school, they each said that most of the kids in their class (who were 10 or 11 at the start of sixth grade) had Instagram accounts. I asked Zuckerberg what he planned to do about that. He said, ‘But we don’t allow anyone under 13 to open an account.’ I told him that before our call I had created a fake account for a fictional 13-year-old girl and I encountered no attempt to verify my age claim. He said, ‘We’re working on that.’ While writing this chapter (in August 2023), I effortlessly created another fake account. There is still no age verification, even though age verification techniques have gotten much better in the last four years, nor is there any disincentive for preteens to lie about their age.” Go get ’em, Jon! Get ready to smash your router with a hammer and take your kids to the park after reading how our social interactions have, for millions of years, been embodied, synchronous, one-to-one or one-to-several, with a high bar for entry or exit. Whereas now we have slathered ourselves so deeply digital that social relationships have become disembodied, asynchronous, one-to-many, with a low bar for entry and exit. No wonder we are lonely! (Which is, no biggie, worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to this report from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.) Paraphrasing Esther Perel: 'We got a thousand friends online but nobody to feed our cat.' Tightly written, endlessly punctuated with charts, with every chapter nicely summarized with a perfect bullet-point one-pager, this book is designed for max skimmability. You could honestly just flip past the 100 graphs and get the story. This is a rallying cry and anti-tech manifesto which offers new ways of living that look an awful lot like old ways of living. I am continuing to work with my school and public school board to get cell phones out of schools. I am asking my city councillor for more ‘loose parts’ playgrounds instead of neon-red Safe-T-Shapes that no one likes. I am sending the wonderful work from the Let Grow movement to my public school board's Director of Education while also working hard with Leslie to give my kids longer and longer ranges so they can grow up untethered and antifragile. I have a long way to go but this book is nitro to get there. As Jon says in the very last three sentences of the book: “The Great Rewiring of Childhood, from play-based to phone-based, has been a catastrophic failure. It’s time to end the experiment. Let’s bring our children home.” Amen. Listen to my 2022 chat with Jon in his kitchen, over his wife’s delicious Korean food, right here. Read my favorite pages from the book here and here. Tell your neighbors about the book. Tell your friends! Tell your principals! Let’s keep the movement building. This book has been at the top of The New York Times bestseller list every single week since it came out a month ago and is currently #1 overall non-fiction book in the world on Amazon. WE HAVE LIFTOFF! Get a copy from your local indie bookstore, from the library, from Jon's site directly, from my non-commission-link-splitter. Just get it! Highly recommended.
2. Goodbye, Galleria by Shari Kasman. I’ve been feeling mall-nostalgic lately. They’re bashing them down all around me. The people demand luxury condo skyscrapers! The $3 million dollar condo crowd simply will not rest till they get brand-name sinks on the 37th story! So malls are going. Fare thee well. Headed the way of the Passenger Pigeon. Mall loss makes me sad. Not just for nostalgia! For community. Malls fostered and made deeply inclusive space for warmth, rest, and connection across society. The malls I grew up with were always strata-slicing not disparity-amplifying. They weren’t for rich people. They weren’t for poor people. They were for people. When we were little my sister and I would be led by our parents through Eaton’s or The Bay, past the perfume-sprayers, out onto the embossed-brown-circles-on-brown-vinyl long ramp up and into a world of Fabriclands, Grand&Toys, and Coles Bookstores, before getting Manhattan Fries in a paper box with a tiny wooden fork or, sometimes, sitting on Santa’s lap. I miss the Rave Rave Rave in the Five Points Mall, the dark and long Oshawa Centre, and the forever-sandy floors at the Whitby Mall. We’d walk past old men with hairy shoulders in white tank tops on wooden benches outside the barber shop while moms with their hair in buns and open-buttoned winter jackets swerved strollers with big plastic bags hanging off the ends. This evocative photo journal by Shari Kasman gave me rushing wistfulness, blurry memories, and bittersweet nostalgia as she catalogues a two-year Halcyon Day period in the life of the Galleria Mall, which opened at the corner of Dufferin and Dupont in downtown Toronto in 1972. She writes: “Arcade games, rides, and candy dispensers that once lined the corridors are gone, and sheets of paper cover store-front windows formerly inhabited by fashionable mannequins. The food counter has vanished, and parts of the ceiling have been torn down, revealing the mall’s guts: wiring and ductwork. Even the iconic brown floor tiles have started to disappear.” There are shots of faded Zellers signs and we cruise past stores with names like Smoker’s Choice, Vic’s Fashion Jewelry, Health Food, and !nk Smart. The book is a twinge mocking but the tone wasn’t strong enough to negatively affect my read-feel. I know I’ll keep picking it up for the rest of my life whenever I suddenly feel like walking through a mall of my childhood. Thank you for this gift, Shari. And thank you to new downtown Toronto indie bookstore Flying Books for displaying it at the cash. Highly recommended.
3. Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life by Steve Martin. I walked over to visit my friend Michael Bungay-Stanier (The Coaching Habit) the other night and got there early. There was a Little Free Library across the street so I snapped open the magnet-attached door and found a pristine copy of this book inside. I have never seen a Jerry Seinfeld blurb on a book before and this one jumped out: “One of the best books about comedy and being a comedian ever written,” says the comedy king. So I picked it up! What is the book? A 17-year-old memoir by then-62-year-old Steve Martin, entirely written with a comic’s keen eye for economy. Short, tight sentences from The School of Cormac McCarthy. Steve tells a straight-faced, occasionally funny, always honest story of what might seem like a relatively benign life ordering magic tricks out of the back of a magazine and getting a job at the joke shop and, later, having panic attacks on weed and reconnecting with his family. But nothing sounds benign through Steve Martin’s lens. And what helps make the book special are endlessly weaved in morsels of from-my-later-years wisdom. He sounds a bit like the invisible narrator of ‘The Wonder Years’ and always comes across as humble and open-hearted. On page 27: “… my mother grew more and more submissive to my father in order to avoid his temper. Timid and secretive, she whispered her thoughts to me with the caveat ‘Now, don’t tell anyone I said that,’ filling me with a belief, which took years to correct, that it was dangerous to express one’s true opinion.” He shares his values. On page 34, after getting the job at the joke shop: “I harbored a secret sense of superiority over my teenage peers who had suntans, because I knew it meant they weren’t working.” He shares regrets. Page 46, after hitting the road as a struggling weird-magician playing to near-empty rooms: “When I moved out of the house at eighteen, I rarely called home to check up on my parents or tell them how I was doing. Why? The answer shocks me as I write it: I didn’t know I was supposed to.” He shares thoughts on comedy: “All entertainment is or is about to become old-fashioned,” and, “The more physically uncomfortable the audience, the bigger the laughs.” He talks about non-obvious ingredients to success: “Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.” And his later chapters on wrestling with fame are spectacular and must-read for anyone navigating dynamics of public attention. Tightly squeezed, highly concentrated, and double-spaced with lots of photos so the 204 pages feel breezy. Sometimes when you’re walking across town to your buddy’s place and completely mistime it you are lucky enough to discover a wonderful book. Highly recommended.
4. Five Little Indians by Michelle Good. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick, a book personally chosen and recommended by my wife. Over to you, Les! “Five Little Indians is a heartbreaking, hope-filled, empathy-expanding book about five survivors of Canada’s residential schools. The story follows Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie, and Maisie’s lives as they are released from their detainment and struggle, with great determination, to find safety and some way forward. Their lives weave and interconnect through themes of resilience, the dire impacts of childhood trauma, healing, and perseverance. Since I closed the book I haven’t stopped thinking about each of them and how their stories represent so many other people whose childhoods were stolen from them, so many others who are struggling today because of how they were mistreated as children, and how incredibly damning childhood trauma is. This book should be required reading for every Canadian as we work to come to terms with the horrors that happened here in Canada and somehow use the lessons of the past to work toward protecting children around the world from violence, control, and mistreatment.”
5. Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sacher. I remember being 8 years old thinking I didn’t like books. I remember I used to! But suddenly I didn’t like reading anymore. My librarian at Sunset Heights Public School, Mrs. Farrell, had shocks of wild maroon and black hair and thick glasses, and she said “Neil, you just haven’t found the right book.” She guided me through the metallic wire bookshelves full of crinkly laminated paperbacks and picked up ‘Sideways Stories from Wayside School’ and handed it to me. The book blew my mind! Funny, absurd, transgressive, a bit deranged, it represented a way I was coming to see the world. I loved it right from the four sentences on the back cover: “There’d been a terrible mistake. Wayside School was supposed to be built with thirty classrooms all next to each other in a row. Instead, they build the classrooms one on top of each other … thirty stories tall! (The builder said he was very sorry.)” One important note: If you get the book I recommend the version illustrated by Julie Brinkloe. Each of the 30 chapters, for each of the 30 students on the 30th story of Wayside School, is opened with a cherubic, Fox Trotty-style cartoon from Julie that (to me) perfectly matches the tone of the book. The book was written in 1978 and the Brinkloe art was commissioned by Avon Books for this 1985 edition. Later editions make the art too abstract and surreal. So I say find Sideways Stories from your local used bookstore—or from online used seller Abe Books! Btw, I put Louis Sacher and this book in the Acknowledgements for The Book of Awesomein 2010 and was lucky enough to meet him in 2020 when we sat down for a 3 Books interview. (Turns out a lot of his absurdism was inspired by ‘Nine Stories’ by J.D. Salinger! (6/2020))
6. Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti. This is not a book. It is a piece of modern art…wrapped in a book. Sheila Heti, author of Pure Colourand Motherhood, has pulled off an incredible feat: She typed up 500,000 words from a decade’s worth of journals in Microsoft Excel, kept them all in their original ‘sentence form’ but ignored all paragraphs and dates, and then—poof, magic!—sorted all the sentences … alphabetically. “How much I enjoy pleasure. How much pleasure there is in just sitting around, writing, eating and reading. How nice it is to contemplate new things for a change, and how good it would be to do that every day, just as last night we contemplated the stars, another day it could be a tree; how many experiences are available to us in the nearest vicinity that we do not grasp hold of, let alone all those experiences at a further distance. How nice it is to have all these lovers, whatever happens with them. How nice it would be if one could actually rely on them. How random life is!” Um…wow, Sheila, you keep good diary. Flip this magic trick open to any page and you are met with a twisted sour-sweet combination of banality, wisdom, sultriness, and little confessions or ideas towards ever-so-slightly better living. Everything is mixed together and shared unflinchingly through the cloak provided by the alphabetization. Here are the book’s opening 3 sentences: “A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have many things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by its binding. A book like a shopping mart, all the selections.” There are 25 chapters in the book because she didn’t start a single sentence in 10 years with the letter X. Here’s how ‘chapter’ B starts: “Back at his place, he showed me pictures of his ex-girlfriend, and I talked to him about Lars. Back home, I just lay in my room alone and masturbated, content with my mediocrity. Bad metaphor, humans as machines.” Now while it may sound like putting together this book was a simple task it was clearly lonnnnnng-simmered—boiled down, down, down for years, years, years. By my count this book is around 50,000 words which means 90% of the diary was thoughtfully chiseled away to leave the glittering silhouettey-statue that remains. Brave, daring, vulnerable, tender, funny, sexy and always a little wonderfully askew, this is a deeply insightful, Instagram-fracturing diary of a novelist thoughtfully coming of age downtown in the 2010s. Highly recommended.
7. The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck. This is one of the most wonderful and wonderfully unusual books I have ever read. First up, Steinbeck! You know Johnny Steinbeck. Pulitzer-Prize winning author of 'East of Eden' (03/2017), 'Of Mice and Men', and 'The Grapes of Wrath'. But did you know that in 1940, after controversy erupted around The Grapes of Wrath (“Communist! Labor-sympathizer! Socialist!”), Johnny decided to say eff y’all and ship out. Literally. He and his pal Edward F. Ricketts (the basis of the character ‘Doc’ in ‘Cannery Row’ five years later) hailed a little sardine boat called the Western Flyer, together with its hilarious never-working-properly side boat, and then went on a slightly bizarre, world-connecting, animal-collecting, pattern-seeing, often meditative, and occasionally brain-burstingly philosophical 4000 mile voyage around the Baja peninsula (aka the big long pinky-finger down the left side of Mexico), into the Gulf of California which, I learned, is also known as The Sea of Cortez. The book is arranged in a series of vivid diary entries through March and April 1940. There are so many wonderful pull-quotes I want to share with you that I turned them into an entirely separate blog post and posted it right here. Steinbeck’s thoughts on pelicans, sea lions, the military complex, the turning tides of time, teleology (which was our Word of the Chapter with Cal Newport!), and much, much more. The book is coated in all kinds of intros, outros, and appendices, none of which I read. But the journal entries—wow, they take you right there. If you want to sail a boat around Baja eighty years ago, this is the book for you. Highly recommended.
8. Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I first came to this book via Gretchen Rubin, who called it one of her 3 most formative books way, way back in the Paleolithic era of the podcast. I’ve since found it to be the perfect chapter book to read aloud with burgeoning brains. I just read it with my five-year-old who was enraptured throughout. It begins: “Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house of logs. The great, dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around the house, and beyond them were more trees. As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods. There were no houses. There were no roads. There were no people. There were only trees and the wild animals who had their homes among them.” Sounds like not much goes down! But ah, that’s where you’re wrong. Panther attacks and smoking fish in trees and playing catch with pig bladders—it all goes down in the very first volume of the nine-book “Little House” series which begins with this 1932 classic. Make sure you get the version illustrated by Garth Williams! We just made that mistake with the sequel ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ which we’re reading now. Had to exchange our tiny, fine-print edition for 18-point font version with good ol' Garth’s drawings. (Who, I just learned, did ‘Charlotte's Web’ (2/2020) and ‘Stuart Little,’ too!). Anyway, back to 'Little House in the Big Woods': A vivid, highly detailed, unforgettable photo tableau of life in Wisconsin in the 1800s. Highly recommended.
