Who else is feeling a little prickly-anxious about the start of school and the resulting slow grind of new routines working their way into some kind of smooth flow?
I feel that way. I just did an interview with Forbes you can check out for a bit of a happiness habit refresh. And have a new article on CNBC about doing Rose Rose Thorn Bud at night. Our new journal based on the practice ‘Two Minute Evenings’ sold out the first day! Took a while but new copies are now back in stock on Chronicle or Amazon.
This month I loved jumping ten millenniumsin the future in the bubbling, rainbow-colored wowshow of ‘Moonbound’ by Robin Sloan. I finished a couple bedtime read-a-louds with my kids. And in the midst of US election overwhelm I was reminded about some of what’s at stake through the masterpiece ‘Stasiland,’ which is a wonderfully woven “kitchen table conversation” style of journalism from behind the Berlin Wall. Plus a lot more!
Let’s keep focused on reading amidst the endless beeps and boops.
And now let’s get to the books…
Neil
PS. If you know someone who wants to read more they can join us here!
1. The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank. I’ll tell you how I ended up reading this book and then tell you what I thought. 15 years ago my nascent seven-month-old blog ‘1000 Awesome Things’ was nominated for ‘Best Blog’ in the world from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. I was immediately approached by a bunch of literary agents including Erin Malone, who represented Christian Lander, a fellow Torontonian who wrote a blog I loved called ‘Stuff White People Like’ (featuring #9 “Making you feel bad for not going outside” and #85 “The Wire”). I signed with Erin and she told me she wanted to auction my blog to publishers … next week. Suddenly I was in the foreign position of interviewing editors who were somehow clamoring to publish my book. I signed with Amy Einhorn, a woman I’d never heard of, who just started an eponymous imprint I’d never heard of, within Putnam Publishing, which I’d also never heard of. But I was magnetically attracted to her vision for the book, which was different than everybody else’s. I learned everything about editing from Amy in our passionate late-night diatribe-y emails to each other, our hot-potato-ing of 300-page Word docs back and forth with 100s of comments in red down the sides, and arguing—good arguing!—about every single element along the way. I’d sit in her New York office and she’d have a variety of ‘cases’ laid out on her desk. “What do you think of 5” by 7”?” she’d say. “Too precious? Too cute?” (We went with a 5.5" by 7.5" for the record.) Or she’d say, “Neil, ‘Blowing your nose in the shower’ is out. Too frat boy! It’s a hardcover. It’s a gift book. It’s for moms.” I absolutely loved working with her. By some accounts Amy Einhorn is the most successful editor in the world today with the highest percentage of books edited that hit the New York Times bestseller list. She has a knack for sniffing out voice, for knowing what will work and what won’t and, as you can imagine, I’ve been begging her to come on my podcast for six years to ask her about her secrets. She finally acquiesced and I fly down to New York City next week. (She’s now running Fiction at Crown.) Of course, I get the 3 formative books in advance and this one—‘The Girls’ Guide To Hunting And Fishing’—was tops on her list. ‘The Girls’ Guide To Hunting And Fishing’? Uh ... yeah. I will say up front if you asked me if I wanted to read a coming-of-age romantic and sexual awakening first-person narrative from a snappy, turbo-charged Jersey-girl-turned-New Yorker through the 80s and 90s I would have potentially said “Pass!” But I loved it. This is an absolutely stunning read with strong ‘When Harry Met Sally’ vibes throughout. Fast, funny, twisting, turning. The title of the book makes zero sense till you get to last chapter and they even took the bold publishing step of not even printing “A Novel” on the cover to help us out—just a tiny small caps FICTION in the lower left corner. After a mildly annoying ten page flips you hit the book’s first sentence where, without any context, you’re thrust into the mind’s eye of a teen girl looking out the front window of her house: “My brother’s first serious girlfriend was eight years older—twenty-eight to his twenty.” Melissa Bank writes with a magical Claire Keegan (‘Foster,’ 9/2023) brand of writing I’d call “vivid sparsity.” The story is told through seven short stories that leapfrog through Jane Rosenal’s life with a wild unpredictability that feels like real life. It starts with Jane as a teen trying to understand sex and love: “My theory was that if you had breasts, boys wanted to have sex with you, which wasn’t exactly a big compliment, since they wanted to have sex anyway. Whereas if you had a beautiful face, like Julia, boys fell in love with you, which seemed to happen almost against their will. Then the sex that you had would be about love.” (page 21) Trying to understand drugs: “There was a keg, but when someone asked if we’d like a beer, Linda said, ‘I wish we could.’ I didn’t find out what she’d meant until a joint was passed to her and she handed it right off to me, saying, ‘Remember the three Ds from detox: don’t, don’t, don’t.’ I passed the joint, as though exerting heroic self-control. She said, ‘You still get flashbacks?’ ‘I think I always will,’ I said.” (page 25). There are highs. There are lows. In her mid-30s: “But I just said, ‘Yeah.’ And ‘Yeah,’ again. Even to myself, I sounded like somebody who smoked cigarettes in front of the drug store all day.” (page 171) There is death, like after a funeral: “I walked through the meadow. I sat at the picnic table. I looked hard at everything, so I wouldn’t forget. Then I picked an apple from the tree for the ride home.” (page 199). And there are endless LOLs, too: “It occurs to me that I may not be the only butterfly whose wings flutter in the presence of his stamen. After she glides off, Robert tells me that she composes music for movies and has been nominated for an Oscar. I think of my only award, an honorable mention in the under-twelve contest to draw Mr. Bubble.” (page 235). The vignettes gave me the feeling of watching a high-school volleyball game in a cramped gym. Lot of bumps, some sets, and a variety of fastballs-off-the-back-wall, just-missed-its, and a few hard, deep spikes. This is an astounding life portrait told with speed, precision, zingers, and a rare three-dimensionalization. What a stunning voice! Thank you, Amy, yet again. Highly recommended.
2. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. Illustrated by Quentin Blake. I hated Beavers. I cried to my mom every Wednesday night on our walk home from the gym at Sunset Heights Public School. I was around six years old and would be wearing blue and brown hat and blue and brown vest after spending a couple hours getting pegged repeatedly in dodge ball and failing to properly stitch badges onto felt. Needless to say I never made it to Cubs. And Boy Scouts sounded like a nightmare! But I’ll never forget my last night in my last (and first!) year at Beavers. We were led from the gym to the library where we were sat down on the pebble-filled carpet amongst the three-foot-high shelves of crinkly wrapped picture books in front a TV / VCR rack. Someone pulled out the long orange extension cord while another cracked open the plastic video case of “Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory” (1971) starring Gene Wilder and (thankfully!) written by Roald Dahl. I fell in love with the movie and then picked up the book and read it so many times throughout my life. (It’s definitely one of my answers to the question: “What’s one book you read as a kid that’s still on your shelf today?”) A couple weeks agoI read it again with my five-year-old in a unique way. I read him the first three chapters (“Here Comes Charlie,” “Mr. Willy Wonka’s Factory,” and “Mr. Wonka and the Indian Prince”). They’re fast and easy—15 pages in 14-point font with 7 drawings from the inimitable Quentin Blake mixed in—and are a perfect little gateway into the book. My son got to meet Charlie (“How d’you do? And how d’you do? And how d’you do again? He is pleased to meet you.”), hear about the fabled factory, and get the bizarre sideways subplot (understandably struck from the film!) about Indian mogul “Prince Pondicherry” who has Mr. Wonka build a Taj Mahal-type joint out of chocolate but after taking a nap during a “very hot day with a boiling sun… woke up to find himself swimming around in a huge brown sticky lake…” So that got my 5-year-old into it. Then Leslie and I had to stuff the Odyssey for a three-hour-long drive so we downloaded the 2013 wonderfully one-man-acted by Douglas Hodge audiobook and noticed it was … 3 hours and 18 minutes. Perfect! How many audio books are that short? Dahl is such a wizard of economy. So we listened the whole way and it entranced us all. I was in the Sunset Heights library again—seeing the factory with a new perspective, new glint, new peek through the window. Then when we arrived at our rental place on a lake in smalltown Ontario with three chapters left. Which was perfect for me to read to him before bed. Btw: Since being tipped off by Latanya and Jerry on the Bronx Bound Books Bus I always recommend Libro.FM for audio books. (Here’s the link to Charlie.) I don’t have any affiliation with the company but I love that they have all the same audiobooks but give their profits to the indie bookstore of your choosing. Right now I’m supporting my friends at Mable’s Fables, a wonderful children’s bookstore in Toronto. This is a story I can read again and again and again. Highly recommended.
3. Why Are People Into That? A Cultural Investigation of Kink by Tina Horn. “Kink-positive, for sure,” Sarah said. “That’s like my first or second thing.” She was behind the counter of her coffee shop in an otherwise-treacly patch of Little Italy. It was a couple years ago and we were talking about criteria we were looking for in a therapist. I hadn’t heard the phrase again until I saw this book sitting on the front table of the new Indigo Rideau Centre in Ottawa. I browsed the Table of Contents, could feel internal aversions and curiosities, and knew I should probably pick it up to learn more. There are nine chapters and all of them go 20-pages deep on the philosophy, history, personal history, and what-I-think-might-be-happening-heres of a specific fetish like ‘Feet,’ ‘Spanking,’ ‘Consensual Nonconsent,’ ‘Cash,’ ‘Orgies,’ and ‘Bimbofication,’ which I learned is “a fetish activity in which a person of any gender is transformed into a bubbly, insatiably-horny, empty-headed, smooth-brained, fun-loving, hyperfeminine creature.” She shares how in cartoons on the topic “breasts explode out of blouses, cappuccinos become frappucinos, white lab coats give way to cinched corsets, and brows once furrowed in thought are smoothed.” There is … a lot here. And I love how it all opens: with Tina flashing back 15 years to the 2000s to her hometown of Oakland when she runs smack into her high school boyfriend outside the movie theater—the guy she’d “first had orgasms with” when they weren’t at “swimming practice, watching Fight Club, or smoking cloves outside the nearest city’s midnight movie festivals”—and then proceeds to tell him that she’s now a professional dominatrix. To which he replies: “I always knew you’d *get into* that stuff.” Tina Horn is a #1 Apple Podcast host and Lambda Literary fellow who writes with a fearless and breezy-intellectual blogging tone that calls to mind Mark Manson. She says, “This book grew out of the project that began with my podcast, inviting readers far and wide to join a sociocultural investigation in which kink is the artifact in question, the text being analyzed—a deep dive into all manner of erotic fantasies and activities, blending pop culture, history, and personal narrative.” In Chapter 1 on feet she wonderfully tilts the mirror onto how kinks and fetishes are viewed by our culture today. She talks about a ‘Sex and the City’ episode with Miranda having a relationship with a shoe salesman who, by the end of the episode, “bites his tie, breathes heavily, and seems to comically orgasm in his pants from merely placing shoes on her bare feet.” She also recounts a 2019 “smirking like he can barely contain himself” Jimmy Kimmel teasing Margaret Qually on his show about how her feet are featured by presumed-weirdo-fetishist Quentin Tarantino in ‘Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood.’ The book reads as a manifesto and call-to-arms seeking to rally people towards “a new code of sexual ethics based on imagination, curiosity, and communication. An ethic that abolishes the thought-policing (along with the long history of literal policing) of erotic ideas, fantasies, and tastes.” As Tina writes: “Every person reading this has, at some point in their lives, felt a longing for an embodied experience of pleasure or particular configuration of companionship that was roundly suppressed by their inner cop.” Explore the limits of your inner cop with this brave, challenging, insightful, researched-based, story-driven exploration.
4. All Fours by Miranda July. There was a funny scene in our house last month where two shipments arrived the same day, from the same place (Indigo!), with the same book. I heard there was a new Miranda July book and since reading her mind-bending ‘No One Belongs Here More Than You’ (3/2022) I’d been a fan. (That was one of the 3 most formative books from Daniels, filmmakers behind ‘Everything, Everywhere All At Once.’) I didn’t know who Miranda was or what else she wrote but that name—Miranda July!— was just attached to a delicious meal my brain had eaten. Leslie read it first and it was fun watching her emotional ups and downs with the book over the past couple weeks. Here comes her Leslie’s Pick now: “When I saw ‘All Fours’ by Miranda July recommended in The Cap, a newsletter I subscribe to and appreciate for its thought-provoking and compassion-growing take on parenting teens, as a great summer read on motherhood and intimacy, I ordered it right away. The story follows a 45-year-old woman trying to find her next big work project, craving space away from her mundane life with her child and husband right at the same time that she aches for the beauty of it, struggling to hear her own desires for intimacy and pleasure, and then acting on her desires. It definitely captured all my attention while I read it in how brutally honest, candid, and racy it was. Some parts I found deeply resonant and poignant about what it’s like to be a mother and an almost middle-aged woman in today’s society, reminding me of the wonderful ‘Wild and Sleepless Nights’ (1/2024). Other parts were much more shocking and radical and peppered the book with surprising twists and at times laugh-out-loud absurdity. However, it makes sense to me that in the acknowledgments July explains that she conducted several conversations with women to inform the book and its theme of what it’s like to be a woman in perimenopause, because the common humanity, common bittersweetness, of being a 40-something-year-old woman rings through throughout.”
5. Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth. I mentioned Amy Einhorn in my first review this month and this is another of her formative books. The entire time I was reading this book—my third-ever Philip Roth after ‘The Human Stain’ (6/2017) and ‘American Pastoral’ (8/2017)—I kept thinking: “This was written in 1959? Seriously?” It is Roth’s first book and in a sparse 136 pages he tells a little small-but-feels-big romantic summer love affair between a Jersey college boy and the snobby Radcliffe girl from a posh family who he meets at the club’s swimming pool. (First sentence: “The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses.”) There is 1950s phone-call flirting, 1950s house-dates with siblings, and yes, as per the cover, some fuzzy-scene pool sex (“Then, in a moment, it was the sun who kissed us both, and we were out of the water, too pleased with each other to smile. Brenda shook the wetness of her hair onto my face and with the drops that touched me I felt she had made a promise to me about the summer, and, I hoped, beyond.”) I love the blurb about Philip Roth on the back cover from Saul Bellow: “Unlike those of us who come howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, teeth, speaking coherently.” We see this all over the book like on page 19: “We came back to the chairs now and then and sang hesitant, clever, nervous, gentle dithyrambs about how we were beginning to feel towards one another. Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them—at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. We whipped our strangeness and newness into a froth that resembled love, and we dared not play too long with it, talk too much of it, or it would flatten and fizzle away.” Not bad, right? Oh, anyone else need to look up dithyramb? That would be: “a usually short poem in an inspired wild irregular strain.” I loved the book and it was also wonderful reading something with a first-person narrator named Neil! Even spelled the same way! Know any other Neil-books? I don’t! I’ll take it! PS to writers: If you feel like being intimated check out the first sentence of Roth’s biography from the inside flap: “In the 1990s Philip Roth won America’s four major literary awards in success: the National Book Critics Circle Award for ‘Patrimony’ (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for ‘Operation Shylock’ (1993), the National Book Award for ‘Sabbath’s Theater’ (1995), and the Pulitzer Price in fiction for ‘American Pastoral’ (1997).” Not a bad six years, Phil! Great, quick, powerful read. I’m also adding this to our list of Great Books Under 150 Pages.
6. Moonbound by Robin Sloan. This is the book I spent the most time with this month and it felt like riding a rainbow-speckled rocketship. I had heard great things about Robin Sloan’s ‘Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore’ and subscribe to his wonderful email list, which he publishes every 29-and-a-half days, and which I just reprinted a little excerpt from last month. Then I got a text from reader-extraordinaire Michael Bungay-Stanier (‘The Coaching Habit’) who said “Have you read Robin Sloan’s new book? Mate, it’s so good. He’d be a great guest for 3 Books.” The feeling of this book is like the front cover image above twisting into a kaleidoscope of images again and again and again. I fell into this book like almost nothing else and I simultaneously had no idea what was going on and couldn’t wait to find out what happened next. There are talking beavers. Talking swords! Strange video games. And ever-expanding worlds with wizards, who maybe aren’t really wizards, and oh—the entire book is narrated by a microscopic AI-type chronicler, who’s been in many different lives across the millenniums, but who now sits in our protagonist’s left shoulder. This book is—delightful. Mesmerizing. Far, far away. A kind of jacked up ‘Star Wars’ meets ‘Cloud Atlas’ featuring Willy Wonka and Mad Hatter types with occasional moments of poignancy and reflection that let you see, and see around, our endlessly twisting lives together. A big, loud, cymbal crash of a book. Highly recommended.
7. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. For me this book went from great to slow to upsetting. I’d heard of ‘Little House on the Prairie’ for years but it wasn’t till Gretchen Rubin tipped me off to the prequel ‘Little House In the Big Woods’ (4/2024) that I cracked the series. That Big Woods has become a mandatory read-a-loud in our house for kids around age five. It’s the perfect visual tableau of a not-that-long-ago yesteryear that gently introduces conversations around things like guns, living off the land, getting attacked by cougars, and, of course, playing catch with pig bladders. My 5-year-old wanted to read the second of the seven book series next and I went hunting for a used copy that was illustrated by Garth Williams. (Note: If you’re buying ‘Little House in the Big Woods’ or ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ make sure you get the ones illustrated by Garth Williams. They really bring it to life!) This 1935 book opens strong: “A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.” It gave me some Aldo Leopold-like experience of observing nature and I felt like was right there in front of the crisp fires, raging rivers, or getting scolded by Blue Jays for taking berries from the bush. But as the book goes on there is more tension with Indians and characters are introduced and views espoused that sound ghastly. I’m against censoring old books but geez—the views are so racist and ugly. Indians are depicted as characters who create trouble, walk into your home, and steal whatever they want. Characters swing by their little house on the prairie and offer wisdom like “Land knows, they’d never do anything with this country themselves. All they do is roam around over it like wild animals. Treaties or no treaties, the land belongs to folks that’ll farm it. That’s only common sense and justice.” (page 211) When Laura asks Pa what’s happening he explains: “When white settlers come into a country, the Indians have to move on. The government is going to move these Indians farther west, anytime now. That’s why we’re here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick. Now do you understand?” (page 237) No, don’t understand. In fact I was so horrified I stopped reading my son the book and we moved on to ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’ What books do you recommend—for me, or my kids—that better illuminate the American indigenous experience? Definitely don’t suggest this one.
8. Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wallby Anna Funder. A fascinating book I would never have read if it wasn’t suggested to me by Oliver Burkeman (author of ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ (8/2021) and the great newsletter The Imperfectionist). After World War II Germany was broken up by the Berlin Declaration and four years later, in 1949, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was formed, better known as East Germany. The Orwellian communist country existed for forty years until the fall of the Berlin Wall. And who ran the GDR? The Stasi, the “internal army by which the government kept control” and whose job was to “know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around.” Sound a bit like Google? But this wasn’t electronic surveillance and tracking everyone’s phone. It was 90,000 people officially working for the secret police along with 170,000 (!) unofficial full-time collaborators. Somebody worked for the Stasi at every pub, factory, and hall you walked into. What did they do? Many things. Wild things! They had jars and jars of thousands of people’s underwear, as one example. They collected ‘smell samples’ of people (different than the underwear collections) and used them to implicate them in crimes. Anna interviews a woman who tried to climb the Berlin wall on New Year’s Eve at age 16 and gets thrown in a horrifying prison for a year and a half. And she even interviews ex-members of the Stasi themselves. A vivid and frightening tale of the devastating potential of totalitarianism. I put this book up there with the wonderful ‘Nothing To Envy’ by Barbara Demick which casts a glowing spotlight onto North Korea today.
