Here in Toronto orange and yellow leaves are covering the roads and the evenings are getting chillier.
I shared my annual birthday advice a couple weeks ago and the algorithms liked this one with over 700,000 people reading or sharing it online now. Other members of our community of optimists have started compiling their own like this list from Australian mum-of-three Ness Quayle. Here's an excerpt and a pic she sent me and you can click to read the whole thing:
I just got another great list from Sera Ertan for her 30th birthday. She includes advice like “Explore dating outside of your type,” “Sun and sea might be enough to cure your depression," and “Learn one new skill every year.” I'll post the whole thing at Neil.blog. Do you have a list of things you’ve (almost) learned? Or want to write one? Feel free to share it back with me so we can keep inspiring each other.
Thank you for hanging out with me each month and if you know others who’d like to join us just send them here.
Happy reading,
Neil
1. Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman. From 2006 until 2020 Oliver Burkeman wrote one of my favorite newspaper columns—the wonderfully titled “This Column Will Change Your Life” in The Guardian. In a lot of ways: It did. Oliver created a wonderful real-time exploration of the self-help universe from the perspective of a particularly compassionate, tart, naval-gazey Brit. After the column finished Oliver wrote ‘Four Thousand Weeks,’ a truly masterful offering that kind of zoomed up and over the self-help canon—bang!—and which I threw in “The Very Best Books I Read In 2021.” The title of that book is a reminder of the average number of weeks in a human lifetime. (4000 weeks is 76.7 years and US lifespan is currently 77.5.) Oliver has a unique perspective and he shares it in the Intro to this follow-up which comes out in 11 days and can be ordered right here: “It starts from the position that you’ll never feel fully confident about the future, or fully understand what makes other people tick — and that there will always be too much to do,” he writes. Why? Not because “you’re an ill-disciplined loser, or because you haven’t read the right bestseller revealing ‘the surprising science’ of productivity, leadership, parenting, or anything else. It’s because being a finite human just means never achieving the sort of control or security on which many of us feel our sanity depends … It just means you’ll always be vulnerable to unforeseen disasters or distressing emotions, and that you’ll never have more than partial influence over how your time unfolds, no matter what YouTubers in their early twenties with no kids might have to say about the ideal morning routine.” Snap! Part poet, part diss rapper, Oliver always keeps it real. I feel like this book was like a bowl of leftover cake and whipped cream I just found in the fridge. It’s not as long or as layered as the ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ meal that preceded it. But it hits the spot! At 162 pages versus 304 the book is broken into 28 short essays meant to be read once a day over four weeks. Oliver invites us to approach the book “as a return, on a roughly daily basis, to a metaphorical sanctuary in a quiet corner of your brain, where you can allow new thinking to take shape without needing to press pause on the rest of your life, but which remains there in the background as you go through the day.” I read 6 the first chunk, then none for three weeks, then picked it back up and suddenly had gobbled 8 more. So, you know, you do you and all. The four weeks have themes—‘Being Finite,’ ‘Taking Action,’ ‘Letting Go,’ and ‘Showing Up’—and each ‘day’ has a curiosity-sparking title before a 3-5 page writeup: “Against productivity debt: On the power of a ‘done’ list,” “Develop a taste for problems: On never reaching the trouble-free phase,” and “Don’t stand in generosity’s way: On the futility of ‘becoming a better person.’” He stirs eloquent thoughts, precise quotes, and, uh, surprise cacao nibs of philosophy into something delicious. For me the size, shape, and incisive wisdom of the book recalls ‘The Art of Living’ by Epictetus (12/2016). A work of mastery that comes with a side-benefit of reducing anxiety about everything. Highly recommended.
2. Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement by Jane McAlevey. What will jobs look like in the future? What roles will AI displace? What industries will emerge? What roles will remain for us outnumbered humans? Makes sense things are brewing in labor. You’ve probably heard about Chris Smalls and a group of Amazon workers on Staten Island forming the first Amazon Workers Union (which, two years later, the company is still fighting). Or news that after many staunchly anti-union years, Starbucks may be willing to negotiate with representatives of its 400+ unionized stores. There’s a bill on California governor Gavin Newsom’s desk this month seeking to ban employer-led anti-union meetings at work. Yet despite the bubbling: There is a record low percentage of American workers in a union today. Why? Are unions becoming ineffective? Have gig roles and freelance jobs taken over? Are turnover rates too high to organize? Have laws tilted from pro-labor to pro-corporation? There were a lot of lines about unions at the Democratic National Convention: “As President, I will bring together labor and workers…” said Kamala Harris. “We need to pass the PRO Act so that workers can organize a union and gain the decent pay and benefits they deserve,” said Bernie Sanders. This fiery, spirited, slightly disorganized 2012 book by recently deceased union organizer and Berkeley policy fellow Jane McAlevey offers an insider’s from-the-ground view of the passion, resolve, and fight necessary to organize workers in a system largely oriented to disorganize them. The book opens with a gripping tale of Florida during the butterfly ballotBush v. Gore election crisis then veers into dramatic fighting, and infighting, over the years. There is a militant pulse in the book and also messiness, ugly politics, and sadness. A good peek into an issue gaining momentum as disparities widen around the world.
3. The Quentin Blake Book by Jenny Uglow. One of our values on reading is that “Librarians are doctors of the mind.” I can’t tell you how many books Sarah Ramsey of Book City gave me that twisted my heart the right way at the right time. (I talk to her about this here.) So I was delighted to see a massive “Staff Picks” wall at the down-the-ramp front entrance of the High Park branch of the Toronto Public Library. It was like a wall of vitamins! My eyes were drawn to the pink sticky note saying “Rebeca’s Pick I loved learning about this artist whose work is known often by his partnership with Roald Dahl.” Quentin Blake! Yes! Right! Kevin the Bookseller threw that particular vitamin down my throat back in Chapter 44 at the Indigo bookstore he runs at Mount Sinai hospital. Rebeca is right, though. Who else still has this image lodged somewhere in the back of their brain?
But now when you see it you learn on page 90 that “By contrast… The Twits, a darker, brutal story, asked for black and white for its prison-like world, and a hard nib to give the mood (and to show Mr Twit’s beard, ‘which had to look like a lavatory brush’). The expressions speak volumes, as the couple play their cruel practical jokes—witness Mrs Twist’s alarm as she is stretched beneath gas-filled balloons, and Mr Twit’s glee as he prepared to tie another one.” Incredible, right? This book is the stories behind the drawings behind the stories. And the Dahl stuff is just one chapter! The book expands and colors in the now-91-years of genius that is Quentin Blake. From his early Punch magazine covers to nude sketches and self-portraits to giant hospital walls and darker illustrations he did to support the migrant refugee crisis. His humanitarian work was completely unknown to me and it’s beautiful. A couple years ago I stumbled on a dog-chewed dark brown hardcover first edition of ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ (8/2024) at The Monkey’s Paw (a must-visit bookstore if you’re in Toronto, which features the world’s first Biblio-Mat!) Incredible find, right? But when I flipped through it I realized I could never love it. It didn’t have Quentin Blake’s drawings. Seriously: What’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory without this:
This book is a succulent and engaging deep-dive into the life and work of an unstoppable artistic master. Highly recommended. (P.S. Quentin is 91 today and still drawing. If you want to experience delight I suggest you check out the gallery on his website. I wish I had a nursery to decorate with this one!)
4. The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green. I love John Green but I admit I resisted this book for a couple years. “I want edgy-gushy- earnest YA! Not serious-sounding essays about … climate change?” But this is a great book. A fun book! A fast book! A book of reviews! John Green is good at reviewing things and he shares that one of his first jobs was writing endless 175-word reviews for Booklist. He also points out the review has become the communication form of our time. “The medication I take to treat my obsessive-compulsive disorder has more than 1,100 ratings at Drugs.com, with an average score of 3.8. A scene in the movie adaptation of my book ‘The Fault In Our Stars’ was filmed on a bench in Amsterdam; that bench now has hundreds of Google reviews,” he writes in the Introduction. One day he told his brother he wanted to write a review of Canada Geese and the idea for this book (and the podcast series that preceded it) struck: “The Anthropocene … REVIEWED,” Hank Green said. So what follows are a series of seemingly disjoint reviews of things like Halley’s Comet, Diet Dr Pepper, Sunsets, and, yes, Canada Geese, where John tells us how the bird used to be rare but is perfectly adapted to our increasingly steamrolled golf-course-covered planet. (“Thank you for paving paradise and putting up parking lots—honnnnnk, honk, honk, honk, honk.”) What emerges is a fascinating mind jumpily exploring secret histories while contemplating the status and fate of our species and planet in a fun and near-lighthearted way. In his review of ‘Scratch ‘n’ Sniff Stickers’ he takes us back into his childhood classroom, then wonderfully opines that “Humans, meanwhile, smell like the exhalations of the bacteria that colonize us, a fact we go to extraordinary lengths to conceal…”, then takes us into the 1960s-developed microencapsulation process the stickers use, borrowed from banking carbon paper, where scratching actually cracks open microcapsules of essential oils, and then he wonders how the nature of smells has changed over time. In his review of ‘The Internet’ he writes: “What does it say that I can’t imagine my life or my work without the internet? What does it mean to have my way of thinking, and my way of being, so profoundly shaped by machine logic? What does it mean that, having been part of the internet for so long, the internet is also part of me?” Of course every review ends in a rating. Canada Geese, you may understand, get 2 stars, the internet gets 3 stars, and scratch ‘n’ sniff stickers get a rare 3 and a ½. Part silly, part serious, as a rare combination of ‘thoughtful short form,’ we hereby officially add this to our Enlightened Bathroom Reading collection. Highly recommended.
5. Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincolnby Doris Kearns Goodwin. Carrying around this book this month was like carrying around a six foot sub on a seven foot wooden plank. I used to drive around and deliver these things 20 years ago and it was so fun. Here I am! With this giant sandwich! Big, beautiful, tasty, delicious. Of course, like the big sandwich, you can only take a couple bites at a time. Even the audiobook is 41 hours and 32 minutes and it’s not the kind of thing you can listen to at 2x. So I bit off the meat and veggies hanging out the sides first—the 16 pages of Epigraph, Contents, Introductions, and Maps followed by the 40 pages of Epilogue, Acknowledgements, Abbreviations, and Index. (I skipped the 121 pages of Notes.) THEN I took a big bite from both sides: the first chapter ‘Four Men Waiting’ and the last chapter ‘The Final Weeks’ before slowly working my way into the middle—mostly by audio jump-around on Libro.FM. There are no rules to reading! (You have the right to skip, the right to dip...) When the story gets going you've slid down a time-traveling slide to Springfield, Illinois 164 years ago with its “multiple saloons and restaurants, seven newspapers, three billiard halls, dozens of retail stores, three military armories, and two railroad depots.” You're a fly on multiple walls meeting 51-year-old Abe as he nervously awaits news on the Republican nomination for President. The writing is wonderfully detailed. You can just picture it when Goodwin tells us Lincoln was “a familiar figure to almost everyone in Springfield, as was his singular way of walking, which gave the impression that his long, gaunt frame needed oiling. He plodded forward in an awkward manner, hands hanging at his sides or folded behind his back … He lifted his whole foot at once rather than lifting from the toes and then thrust the whole foot down on the ground rather than landing on his heel.” You like detail? Here are 757 pages of detail. The high-level story is well known: about Lincoln’s growth through poverty (“moving from one dirt farm to another”) and the establishment and challenge of practicing deep and wide-ranging leadership skills (including, of course, bringing his “team of rivals” into his cabinet) all towards helping a fractured country on many brinks. The first-ever Republican president of the US and (arguably) the best. A massive, monstrous plank of deliciousness that can be feasted on for a long, long time.
6. The Field by Dave Lapp. How do you revisit, explore, and process the uglier and more painful moments of childhood? This graphic novel manages the feat of bullseye-ing in on that particular gnawing stomach stress feeling of being socially excluded as a kid. Dave Lapp doesn’t fire any darts off the board, either. The opening six-page comic in this 540-page coming-of-age graphic memoir gave me a stomach flip: our narrator David and his troublemaking pal Edward draw dirty pictures in their first or second grade class and, at Ed’s insistence, hide them on the board. When the teacher finds them—“Who hid these dirty drawings on my vocabulary board?!”—Edward immediately outs David, who gets marched to the front of the class and has the drawings pinned to his shirt, along with a letter to his mom. “Dear Mrs. Lapp, David drew these dirty pictures and showed them to the whole class, Ms. Lewis.” He starts crying, he bows his head, the teacher provokes him a bit (“DO NOT TAKE IT OFF OR I WILL KNOW!”), and when he’s finally given permission to sit back on the carpet the final scene is Edward … shuffling away from him. What a punch! That’s the vibe here. Spare drawings, accurate pain, a lot of “no, no, no, don’t do thats!”, all ultimately adding up to a slightly harrowing reconnection with the sharper emotional side of growing up.
7,8,9, and 10. Catwings, Catwings Return, Wonderful Alexander, and Jane On Her Ownby Ursula K. Le Guin. I first heard about Ursula K. Le Guin back in 2020 when David Mitchell (‘Cloud Atlas,’ 6/2019) picked ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ (8/2020) as one of his 3 most formative books. That “young adult” book felt anything but to me—creepy, cryptic, eerie. There was a wet, dark, skeletal feeling in that book that felt haunting when I read it and feels haunting when I think about it now. (Incidentally I recommend this wonderful eight-year-old essay David wrote about the series.) So that backdrop is, I suppose, partly what makes the super-slim 4x40-page box set of ‘Catwings’ so surprising. This isn’t dark! It’s a story about a bunch of cats … with wings … who escape alleys, get attacked by owls, suffer rat trauma, find lost siblings, and get trapped by greedy owners with dollar signs in their eyes. Why do the cats have wings? “Mrs. Jane Tabby could not explain why all four of her children had wings. ‘I suppose their father was a fly-by-night,’ a neighbor said, and laughed unpleasantly, sneaking round the dumpster.” Those are the first two sentences of the first book. These are smoother, simpler, more straightforward stories than ‘Earthsea’ that are perfect read-a-louds with kids as young as four or five. There are a few suspenseful scenes but you’re safe in the tight embrace of an ink-flicking master and everything is gorgeously wrapped in detailed illustrations by S.D. Schindler. Looks like Ursula wrote these books throughout her sixties from the late 80s to the late 90s and they are (for good reason!) still in print today.
11. There is no 11! Just our regular look bag of links. I enjoyed cutting out and ticking off the books I’ve read and want to read in The New York Times ‘100 Best Books of the 20th Century.’ I am a bit of a list nut, I admit, and, btw, I’ve only read 12 of them! Thanks to Karen W for telling me about this activism in the world of Little Free Libraries! I loved Ryan Holiday’s essay about swimming. I want to jump in a pool right now. Listen to my now-ancient chat with Ryan at his house in Austin right here. I was interviewed in Forbes last month about top happiness habits. Amy Einhorn, superstar editor of ‘The Help,’ ‘Big Little Lies,’ ‘Let’s Pretend This Never Happened,’ ‘A Higher Loyalty,’ and, yes, ‘The Book of Awesome,’ joined me on 3 Books. Adam Grant shared a new study on the danger of heavy screen use in young children. A nice collection of Kevin Kelly wisdom. I agree with Myrium Gurba. The real tax of US political season. Casey Neistat’s advice to people in their 20s. And have most major sports been ‘figured out’?
