That was the first thing James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and Daunt Books said to me when we recently sat down (Apple/Spotify). He should know! James has been bookselling for 35 years and today is the largest bookseller in the world overseeing nearly 1000 bookstores. “Bookstores are inherently democratic,” he says and he told me authors like Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yaros are driving a passion for reading he "hasn’t seen since Harry Potter.”
You know how soothing it feels when that dull, incessant noise in the background suddenly stops? I feel like that’s the offer with books these days. Quiet the noise! Step away from the screaming screens. And step into peace, tranquility, and imagination.
Neil
P.S. Know someone who wants to read more? They can join us here!
1. Breath: The New Science Of A Lost Art by James Nestor. This book is changing my sleep, my energy, my mood. I get up to go pee in the middle of the night. Sometimes twice. Sometimes three times. Have for years. Premature old man, I guess. But then I read this book. And now I’ve seemingly stopped. I learned in Chapter 3 that overnight mouth breathers—nearly half of us!—lose 40% more water than nose breathers. You know you’re one of us if you sometimes wake up with your mouth like sandpaper in the Sahara. I’d incorrectly assumed overnight dry-mouth wake-ups might contribute to less overnight peeing—like you’d want to keep the water in—but turns out the opposite is true. Nestor writes: “During the deepest, most restful stages of sleep, the pituitary gland, a pea-size ball at the base of the brain, secretes hormones that control the release of adrenaline, endorphins, growth hormone, and other substances, including vasopressin, which communicates with cells to store more water. This is how animals can sleep through the night without feeling thirsty or needing to relieve themselves.” Vass-oh-press-in? I kept reading and discovered that “90% of children have acquired some degree of deformity in their mouths and noses,” 45% of adults snore (not good!), and a whopping 25% of us even CHOKE OURSELVES AWAKE because of sleep apnea—which has a ridiculous undiagnosed case rate of 80%. What helps? Nose breathing. Keeps you hydrated. Prevents snoring. Gets that vasopressin flowing. And (maybe!) keeps you from getting up to go pee. We have so many breathing issues today. Partly it's the old “big evolving brain in a jam-packed skull” problem but we’ve also seemingly lost a lot of ancient human know-how and wisdom. The 2500-year old opening epigraph alone is a power punch. Then he goes on to share how Native American tribes foster nose breathing in babies by “carefully closing the baby’s lips with their fingers after each feeding. At night, they’d stand over sleeping infants and gently pinch mouths shut if they opened.” He quotes an 1800s book by a Missourian who goes to live with Pawnee, Omaha, Cheyenne, and Blackfeet tribes and writes that “The Native Americans explained to Catlin that breath inhaled through the mouth sapped the body of strength, deformed the face, and caused stress and disease.” Btw, we’re only in Chapter 2 here. By the time you’re done you’ll be looking for your uvula in the mirror to assess your susceptibility for sleep apnea (“the Friedman tongue position scale”), maybe buying mouth tape to tape over your lips at night (Nester recommends 3M Nexcare Durapore—I used it last night and recommend, too!), looking for tougher foods to chew, or practicing some of the breathholding exercises mentioned later in the book or in a wonderfully detailed Appendix. I highlighted and dog-eared so much of this book and put some of my favorite pages here. Highly recommended.
2. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. A fascinating book by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) that offers endless mood and texture with an odd-angled semi-plot. I came to it in a weird way. A friend was visiting me a decade ago when he pulled this book out of his backpack, said he’d just bought it, tore through it, and wanted me to read it. Then he moved. I never read the book. I never gave it back. Soaked into the anti-library! But then, in researching James Daunt, I was fascinated to learn he organized his Daunt Books indie bookstore chain by … place. Place? Yeah, not by the genre, not by Dewey Decimal System, but by place. All novels, all history, all culture—there it is! Under Indonesia! Well, I have a trip to Mexico City coming so I looked up “novels taking place in Mexico City” and, wouldn’t you know it, this popped up. I cracked it open and read the first 139 pages—1 of 3 parts the book is split into and titled “Mexicans Lost In Mexico (1975)”—and found myself in a series of first-person diary entries from a 17-year-old literary poet wannabe that … maybe is Bolaño? It’s great. Earnest and eager and raunchy and rich. But then it ends with a dramatic runaway chase scene with our main character, two poets he looks up to, and a prostitute … racing away from her former pimp. And then you turn the page and you’re in Part 2 titled “The Savage Detectives (1976-1996)” and, if you’re me, you’re completely lost. We are now hearing from a cast of dozens of different voices, ‘Lincoln In The Bardo’-style (4/2018), as they tell a sideways-angled tale of … those two poets our protagonist was aspiring to be like/interested in in the first half. THIS GOES ON FOR 400 PAGES! Then suddenly, on Page 591, we’re thrust into Part 3 (“The Sonora Desert (1976)”) and we are suddenly…. back to the first scene! In the car! Racing from the pimp! Cue the wild Breaking Bad-toned finale. Weird book. Wild book! I felt nostalgic, dizzy, confused, disgusted, engaged, lost … but I kept reading. It’s written in such casual language but so abstract in structure and form. Like some kind of weird uncle to ‘Infinite Jest.’ A helluva trip.
3. The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevédo. When I launched 3 Books six years ago I got a phone number—1-833-READ-A-LOT—which lets me collect voicemails from listeners. I play one at the end of every Chapter. Nadia, an educator from the Mojave Desert, called at the end of Chapter 140 with Amy Einhorn to share her reflections on Chapter 105 with Nancy The Librarian—in particular our discussion on getting into audiobooks. “Neil, I’d love to recommend ‘The Poet X’ by Elizabeth Acevédo,” she said. “It’s a book in verse, a novel in verse, and it’s just almost meant to be read out loud. And she reads it herself.” I picked up (i.e., downloaded from Libro.FM, the audiobook company which supports your local indie bookstore, which just fyi I have no formal affiliation with) this 2018 coming-of-age YA book about a Dominican teen girl in Harlem falling in love, losing and finding God, navigating relationships at home and school, and discovering her poetic voice. It really does have a slam-poetry type of flow with Acevédo’s beautiful voice running smooth: “Walking home from the train I can’t help but think Aman’s made a junkie out of me—begging for that hit, eyes wide with hunger, blood on fire, licking the flesh, waiting for the refresh of his mouth. Fiend, begging for an inhale, whatever the price, just so long as it’s real nice—real, real nice—blood on ice, ice, waiting for that warmth, that heat, that fire. He’s turned me into a fiend, waiting for his next word, hanging on his last breath, always waiting for the next next time.” Not every sentence sings like that but a lot do: “We watch YouTube highlights of the winter games, I help Aman fry eggs and sweet plantains.” It’s a short, somewhat paint-by-numbers plot that helped me fill a lot of buzzing airport time with melody.
4. National Audubon Society Pocket Guide: Familiar Mushrooms. We went on a couple long family hikes last weekend. The trails were covered in so many different kinds of mushrooms. Those oyster-shaped ones on the sides of dead logs. Giant, dented-coconut shaped ones on the side of big trees. Bright red ones straight out of Mario World. I could see my kids considered them like I did: They’re probably poisonous! Don’t touch them! But the truth is, I know shit-all about mushrooms. So I grabbed this fantastic pocket-sized 190-page field guide from my grandparents-in-law’s bookshelf and flipped through it. Small enough to fit in your pocket and easy to quickly flip open and use the top-left silhouette legend to find the approximate shape of your mushroom in a few seconds. Then you fine-pick through the detailed color two-page spreads. Right side: Full color unmistakable photo of your mushroom. Left: Details like a short summary and then Identification (field marks), Edibility, Similar Species, Habitat, and Range. There are a lot of poisonous and “deadly poisonous” mushrooms in here! And a whole bunch that are delicious and could save you if/when you’re lost in the woods. Highly recommended.
5. Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How To Finally, Really Grow Up by James Hollis, Ph.D. Average lifespan right now in Japan is 84, Canada 83, England 81, US 77, China 77, India 72. Can we call it 80 roundabouts? That means the second half of your life begins while blowing out the candles on your 40th birthday. Cue mid-life crisis! Buy the convertible, get the lipo, start dating someone 20 years younger! Not so fast. Here comes poetically erudite Jungian analyst James Hollis to save you from that. Giant-minded with an in-the-clouds-and-on-the-street tone this is a masterful, inspiring, deeply soulful book I know I’ll be revisiting over and over. Hollis opens the book with a full page of questions and the headline “Your Life Is Addressing These Questions To You” with some examples being: “What gods, what forces, what family, what social environment, has framed your reality, perhaps supported, perhaps constricted it?” and “Why do you believe that you have to hide so much, from others, from yourself?” and “Why is the life you are living too small for the soul’s desire?” Biggies! His lengthy but worthwhile Intro quotes Nobel Prize nominee Andre Malraux: “The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.” Chapter 1 opens quickly with the title: “Expensive Ghosts: How Did We Get To This Point?” where Hollis makes the argument that “In the end we will only be transformed when we can recognize and accept the fact that there is a will within each of us, quite outside the range of conscious control, a will which knows what is right for us, which is repeatedly reporting to us via our bodies, emotions, and dreams, and is incessantly encouraging our healing and wholeness.” Dude goes deep. We’re in Chapter 1 here. I can’t tell you how many times I hit a rich paragraph that stunned me into stopping. Once I typed up a whole paragraph, emailed it to Leslie, and now we have it stuck up on our kitchen wall. That one comes in Chapter 6 (“The Family During The Second Half Of Life”) where Hollis writes: “What would happen to our lives, our world, if the parent could unconditionally affirm the child, saying in so many words: ‘You are precious to us; you will always have our love and support; you are here to be who you are; try never to hurt another, but never stop trying to become yourself as fully as you can; when you fall and fail, you are still loved by us and welcomed to us, but you are also here to leave us, and to go onward toward your own destiny without having to worry about pleasing us.’ How history would change!” Magnificent, deep, soul-touching with a type of density that required (for me, anyway) many small bites. But if you can handle the occasional phrase like “psychodynamic stratagems” and quite a lot of Carl Jung quotes then I suggest picking this up. (Btw: This is one of Oliver Burkeman’s 3 most formative books. Oliver’s new book ‘Meditations For Mortals’ just dropped and is getting rave reviews. My chat with Oliver will drop on the full moon! Join us on Spotify, Apple, or YT.)
6. The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craftby Robert S. Boynton. I’m a sucker for writers interviewing writers about writing. This 21-year-old book from NYU journalism professor Robert Boynton labels that fun, jumpy, immersive style of Tom Wolfe journalism “new journalism” and then calls the 19 writers interviewed here “new new journalists.” But no matter! It’s just a great batch of dense interviews with folks like Michael Lewis, Susan Orlean, and Jon Krakauer. Where do they get their ideas? How do they make connections in interviews? What does an ideal writing day look like? The book’s a bit longwinded (pot, kettle, I know) but it’s perfect for dipping and slipping in and out.
7. Good Birders Don’t Wear White: 50 Tips from North America’s Top Birders edited by Lisa White. This was another book from this community and I had to go digging on Thriftbooks to find a copy but it was worth it. There is the title advice—“trading the white birding festival T-shirt for a camo jump suit and face paint is a little extreme, but selecting clothing in neutral colors that blend with the environment can reduce the impact of birding on birds and other wildlife”—but a lot more. I learned how to “Choose a Birding Tour Carefully,” “Go Birding At Night,” “Shush and Pish," and “Use A Storm to Your Advantage,” amongst others. The book is field-guide-small and the tone is light, fun, and easy to read. Everything from feeding birds to cleaning binoculars to even drawing birds (from David Sibley himself!) is covered. A nice gift for the birder in your life.
8. Alfie Gets In First by Shirley Hughes. This is our favorite of the wonderful series of picture books created by the incredible Shirley Hughes (1927-2002) of West Kirby, England. Her bibliography includes over 50 books that have sold over 10 million copies. I still remember when Leslie and I met a wonderful children’s librarian in Toronto named Joanne who thrust this book into our hands and, since then, all of our kids have loved reading Alfie’s tales when they’re around 3 or 4. In this story the toddler Alfie does indeed get into the house before his mom and little sister and then the door latches behind him which causes a flurry of neighborhood friends to come over to try to help him out. Gentle tension, vivid drawings, and the warmth of family and community come through—as they do in all the Alfie books. Perfect before bed. Highly recommended.
