Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Happy hot July! Before the recos, a little plug for those of you in Canada I’ll be on Your Morning tomorrow talking about taking two-minutes for self-care each morning. (You didn’t know tomorrow is International Self-Care Day? Good reason to skip work and head to the beach.)
Now onto the books…
Neil
1. The Buddha in the Atticby Julie Otsuka. Completely gripping, poetically written, powerfully provocative novel. I found myself stranded in the Minneapolis airport when I stumbled into a great indie bookstore and found this captivating historical fiction about Japanese “picture brides” shipped to Western California under false pretenses in the early twentieth century to live lives of servitude, neglect, and (very occasionally) beauty. I knew nothing about the background but the book was an eye-and-mind-opener and written in a really unique collective voice. This is one of those “you’ll be hooked in two pages” books. Slapped with all kinds of fancy awards on the back like “Pen/Faulkner Winner for Fiction” and “National Book Award Finalist”, if you’re into that.
2.The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performanceby W. Timothy Gallwey. This book is not about tennis! It’s a fascinating, plainspoken, beautifully vivid portrait of the inner “head game” we are always playing with ourselves. (If you play tennis that’s just a bonus.) Teaches you how to recognize, label, and strip away the inner voices. I would compare to books by Steven Pressfield or Seth Godin. Can’t confirm but have heard this labeled as the original sports psychology book… was written a few decades ago but still reads nice and fresh. (Small bonus for NFL fans: Contains a short foreword written by Pete Carroll before he was coach of the Seahawks.)
3.Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work That Lastsby Ryan Holiday. As the world flattens, content flourishes, and power slips from traditional squeeze points like big media, business, and government, you know who we’re believing in again? Individuals. That means you and me. But how do we earn and keep that trust? We create genuine, quality work that stands the test of time. Perennial Seller is a powerful prescription for doing just that plus finding the long-term fans you need for work you’re making that matters.
4. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years of Pilgrimageby Haruki Murakami. I visited Japan for two weeks fifteen years ago and this book took me back into those memories. My second Murakami novel after Norwegian Wood and it was similarly dreamy, evocative, and emotionally lurching. When Tsukuru Tazaki moves to Tokyo after high school his four closest friends from the suburbs suddenly blacklist him for life without explanation a trauma hangs over his life … until a new flame asks him to face his old demons. Told in a Pulp Fiction-esque sliderule style of timeline – constantly jumping between memories and moments as Tsukuru comes of age.
5. Hitch-22: A Memoirby Christopher Hitchens. Staring at a Van Gogh painting in a museum one day I heard a guy behind me say, “Wow…the confidence!” Confidence? I see a guy sleeping, I see a bale of hay, but where’s the confidence? “What do you mean?” I asked him. “Just look at those strokes. Thick, giant, forceful. He wasn’t dabbing, he wasn’t trying. It looks like the paint flew out of him and splatted on the page. There’s so much confidence.” It was a point I remembered. It’s fun to see a master flick his wrist and effortlessly show you total control of his craft. I thought of that a lot as I read this memoir from Christopher Hitchens. The writing is just so beautiful that every paragraph is a seemingly perfect combination of wisdom and humor. A textured and layered guy in many ways and the book doubles as a nice primer on 20th century political history.
6. I’ve Been To The Mountaintopby Martin Luther King Jr. After I checked into my hotel in Memphis a few weeks ago, I found a framed copy of this speech on my bed with a nice note from my host. (As I was there to speak I found this particularly intimidating.) I had never read the speech before but learned it was the last one he ever gave, while in Memphis, just the day before his assassination. Next year will be the 50th anniversary of the end of his life. His final speech is well worth the read.
7. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Koreaby Guy Delisle. Brilliant, dark, autobiographical tale of French cartoonist Guy Delisle’s transfer to North Korea for a few months for work. (Apparently that’s where animation outsourcing goes for some French cartoons… who knew?) A slow and eerie graphic novel with no explosions, wrongful arrests, or big courtroom dramas. Just a moody window into a different world with the barrenness and strangeness slowly telling the whole story. I loved it.
8. The Abominable Snowman: Choose Your Own Adventure #1by R. A. Montgomery.I’m working on a few projects and have gotten really into exploring different narrative styles. I picked up the first Choose Your Own Adventure and it was fun reading in the second person again. You open the book. You turn the first page. You’re in a cave. You see a bear. Do you poke it or run away? So much more involved and fast paced and a nice slice of nostalgia. Sidenote: I’ve only read one “grown up book” in second person and it was the fantastic How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid. (Let me know if you know of others.)
9.How To Write A Sentence And How to Read One by Stanley Fish. I jumped into this book gung ho. It opens with a story about how writers need to love sentences the way painters need to love paint. I loved the more granular view of writing than I’m used to… but my problem with this book is that it kind of ends there. It gets stuck in the weeds. It reminded me of grammar class. And who likes grammar class? He does give examples of great sentences which make for a fun little quote book but I finished it wanting more and only had a few notes jotted on the inside cover. I am still searching for a book on writing that really speaks to me but for now I’d recommend Bird By Birdby Anne Lammott over this one.
10.The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When To Quit and When To Stickby Seth Godin. After I left Walmart last year I felt discombobulated. Ten years at one place will do that. I felt like that sticky tape on the back of a new credit card after you peel it off. All I knew was how to stick to a credit card. Now I’m a tightly wound ball of tape with no clear purpose. What now? Well, using far better metaphors, Seth Godin would call this a dip. And this little book (74-pages little) is a powerful pump-you-up manifesto for navigating what to quit and when while granting those hazy periods the importance they deserve. A metaphorical summary a friend shared of this book: The longer you hold your breath underwater the more interesting place you come up.
11.HumansBeingBros. To close this month, here’s a little heartwarming subreddit when you need a high five in the middle of a long day. A good reminder we’re all in this together.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
I’m excited to share a lot of books this month. But before I do, I wanted to let you know I'm releasing a brand new journal this summer called Two Minute Mornings. It details the exact, two-minute process I start my day with every day. I write down something I want to let go of, a few gratitudes, and then three specific things I’m going to focus on each day.
And now onto the books.
Neil
1. The Human Stainby Philip Roth. This was my first ever Philip Roth book and it was mesmerizing, mysterious, and magical. Takes place in 1998 where Coleman Silk stars as an impressive college professor booted from his community after wrongly labeled a racist. Turns out he has an even deeper secret and Roth unveils this at just the right time, in just the right way. I won’t ruin the surprise but it makes the rest of the book fascinating. Broadened my understanding of race in more than a few ways. The way he weaves and layers long biographical stories reminds me of books like East of Eden or The Corrections. Now I have to figure out which of his books to read next.
2.Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Lifeby Héctor García and Francesc Miralles. I wrote a lot about ikigai in The Happiness Equation which is perhaps why Hector Garcia mailed me a copy of his new book. I was surprised it was originally written in Spanish but maybe the whole world is clamoring for the next big Japanese trend after The Joy of Tidying Up. The book triangulates and expands elements of Dan Buettner’s famous Blue Zones studies and TED Talk into a well-researched, wide-ranging, well-organized handbook with everything from sharing Okinawan antioxidant rich food to lessons on practicing qigong.
3.The Royal Tenenbaumsby Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson. When I was eighteen I fell in love with the movie Being John Malkovich and went on a binge to collect as much Malkovich merchandise as possible. This was early Internet so you couldn’t just buy weird things online. I sawed a poster off the wall of a dusty video rental shop (with permission), bought some unnecessary $30 album of music from HMV special orders, and, most importantly, bought the screenplay. It was a fascinating look behind the film with an introduction from screenwriter Charlie Kaufman himself as well as scenes written differently (or cut completely) from the film. I learned a lot about neat, crisp, compact writing and enjoyed the experience so much that when I saw The Royal Tenenbaumsscreenplay in a record store I bought it right away. The confidence, detail, and texture in the movie is on full display in this dense and descriptive screenplay. (Ain’t no skimmer here.) It’s a bit rigid and stilted though because I suppose so much of the heart and soul (and music) of the film… comes in the film. Still, a fun read.
4. The Happiness Track: How To Apply The Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Successby Emma Seppälä. This is the only book I’ve ever read by someone with two umlauts in their name. Seriously though, a few weeks after Emma and I met over Twitter, I picked up her book in an airport before getting on a plane. I read it on the flight and it’s a nice overview of the world of positive psychology research. I think I’ve read too much on the subject already so not a ton of new info but, like with most books, there were a few gold nuggets. Also, how impressive is it that she’s the Director of Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research? I imagine that’s a department full of good people. And lots of fresh flowers. And bean bag chairs. And homemade shortbread on top of all the filing cabinets.
5. The Canadaland Guide to Canadaby Jesse Brown. It’s Canada’s 150th birthday this year so the country is full of flags on family home front doors and plastic bags at the grocery store. Yet it’s somehow a strange birthday to celebrate. I couldn’t put my finger on why until I read this biting, funny, satirical look at Canada’s history and culture. This is pretty much exactly Jon Stewart’s America: The Book … for Canada. If the picture of Drake cuddling a moose on the cover makes you smile then the smart, incisive writing inside will make you laugh out loud. My only qualm is that sometimes the humor gets nasty or downright cruel but he toes the fine line between satire and slapstick so beautifully in the rest of the book that I can’t really complain. Super fearless, pulling no punches, eating sacred cow burgers, and keeping every Canadian institute squarely in his bullseye, this is a must read for any current (or future) Canadian.
6. Andre The Giantby Box Brown. Remember how last month I was trumpeting the virtues of Tetris by Box Brown? Well, this is the graphic novel he wrote a couple years before that one and I honestly found it a lot less developed. Less story, less detail, less intrigue, less closure. When you’re tracing the history of very large man born in rural France in 1946 there’s probably a lot of missing pieces. I was really into wrestling as a kid so this was a nice way to color in some lines. But while I’d recommend it for wrestling fans, it doesn’t quite make a crossover hit.
7. Is the Gig Economy Workingby Nathan Heller. Do you remember how last month I was kicking the legs out from under that future of work book? Turns out I was waiting for this New Yorker piece. Less “Where are we going?” than “What does it all mean?”, this impressively detailed article opens up a slew of questions about how the emerging gig economies will work in the future and, more interestingly, the philosophy, values, and trends underpinning these tectonic shifts.
8. You Are Stardustby Elin Kelsey. A beautiful picture book that reads like something Neil Degrasse Tyson would tell your kids if he was over babysitting. The opening lines over the first few pages are: “You are stardust. Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded long before you were born. You started life as a single cell. So did all other creatures on Planet Earth. Like fish deep in the ocean, you called salt water home. You swam inside the salty sea of your mother’s womb. Salt still flows through your veins, your sweat, and your tears. The sea within you is as salty as the ocean. The water swirling in your glass once filled the puddles where dinosaurs drank.” It is beautifully head-trippy, relaxing, meditative little before bedtime book.
1. Tetris: The Games People Playby Box Brown. A completely hypnotic 250-page graphic novel sharing the bizarre true story behind Tetris. Yes, Tetris. Full of Russian KGB agents, the centuries-long Nintendo history, giant lawsuits, and screaming fans. If you liked the fast-pace plot of movies like American Hustle, you will love this. The time and love Box Brown put into this book is incredible. Also, funny story. I Skyped into a French classroom a couple weeks ago and was telling them about this book. The teacher then whipped out a tattered copy onscreen and said it’s helping her students enjoy learning English. Something for everyone.
2.It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Beby Paul Arden. A powerful little pump-you-up handbook by the former Creative Director of ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Fortunately for us, Paul Arden had an up, down, and winding career path leading to that top job so the book serves as a short quippy collection of career wisdom. Even the design and layout of the book is energizing. Written fifteen years ago (just five years before he passed away) but feels like a scrapbooky Tumblr account from today. He has a great page showing business cards of how you could present yourself with how you should present yourself. A ton of reverse engineering positive feelings about yourself. Loved it.
3.Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About The Meaning Of Lifeby Steven Hyden. Pearl Jam versus Nirvana, Biggie versus TuPac, Smashing Pumpkins versus Pavement. This could have been a Wikipedia style summary book of musical feuds but it goes so much deeper. It’s written for music lovers so he skims some details in favor of trying to reflect the rivalry back on our own psychology and the sentiments of the moment. Tough job but he manages to get pretty close to pulling it off. He dissects Blur versus Oasis fans, for instance, and shows how and why Pearl Jam changed the script on their rivalry with Nirvana over the years. Fun read that makes you feel so much more informed on the stories behind the music. Good insight into whether you’ll like it is if you like the blurbers on the back: Bill Simmons, Chuck Klosterman, and Rob Sheffield (who wrote Love Is A Mix Tape.)
4. A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Imagine I was going to explain to you how baseball was played and I did it by describing how a tree gets carved into a baseball bat, giving you the biography of the guy who built the Green Monster, showed you a black and white reel of a radio announcer singing the national anthem, and then took you to an art gallery featuring close ups of dugout floors after a doubleheader. What the? Yeah, exactly. And that’s how this fascinating novel goes about describing the lives of its two central characters over the decades. A giant anecdote about one of their best friends over here, a little window into a date they once had over there. It feels kind of like watching Mulholland Drive. It helps that every chapter is beautifully written but I had to give myself a few pushes to get through. By the end the sculpture that emerged was pretty exquisite though not totally sure it was worth so many scraps on the floor. Won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011.
5. Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatnessby Shawn Micallef. I love living in Toronto but can’t say I’m super connected to the goings on behind this great city. This book filled in the blanks and was an incredible primer on all the forces that have helped Toronto become world class and all the forces that could send it skittering off the rails. Great political prodding with lots of manifesto-like pleas but a little too much Rob Ford for my liking (that’s our deceased crack-smoking mayor, for those that don’t know.) Also, really interesting structure to the book. Shawn took a walk with everyone who narrowly lost a city counselor seat to see the city through their eyes. Nice book for a new category for me. Made me interested to read similar books about other great cities so share a reco if you have one!
6. Playtown: A Lift The Flaps Bookby Roger Priddy. Beautiful kids book featuring seven giant pages of scenes like airport, fire station, and hotel and each page has a dozen little flaps opening into the inner workings of those buildings and scenes. What’s inside the ticket booth, control station, newsstand, and sushi restaurant at the train station? A great introduction to the way things work and helped me get my son a bit more into non-fiction, too.
7. The Long View: Career Strategies to Start Strong, Reach High, and Go Farby Brian Fetherstonhaugh. Remember that speech twenty years about how “in the future” you are going to have ten jobs instead of working at IBM for fifty years and you will need constant retraining instead of grabbing a degree and sitting on it? This book reads like an updated view of that speech. It’s somehow simultaneously brand new and obsolete. Skip it.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Hope you’re enjoying a beautiful Spring or a warm Fall, wherever you are. Here are this month’s recommendations.
Neil
1. Exit Westby Mohsin Hamid. Fantastic love story told about refugees migrating from violence in a slightly futuristic world. Now, if everybody has their favorite punctuation mark, then Mohsin Hamid’s is definitely the comma. (According to Fortune, mine may be the exclamation mark!) Sentences regularly extend to entire pages, with all kinds of metaphors poking in like squiggly little worms, and regressed thoughts, the kind which poke other parts of your brain, those parts of your brain that make you want to grab a notebook before some lightning bolt leaves you, and then the commas kind of loop you back suddenly to where the sentence started, like little worms on roller coasters maybe, and he pulls this feat off frequently, haltingly, nimbly, over and over, and okay, I’ll, stop, now. You get my point. It’s super ornate. The thesis is that we’re all migrants, either from place to place, or by standing still through time itself. Really fun quick read though I didn’t love it as much as The Reluctant Fundamentalist or How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia because I felt like the narration was a bit scientifically distant from the characters at times. He talks about what they do a little more than lets you live with them. I also want to point out this was the first novel I read after East of Edenso I had a bit of a fiction hangover happening.
2.The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way To Live Wellby Meik Wiking. If you haven’t heard then hygge (pronounced “hoo-ga” or “hugh-ga”) is the Danish term describing a combination of coziness, soulfulness, and hominess. And since Denmark always ranks at the top of World Happiness Rankings, people are saying “Gimme some of what they got!” Candles, warm cups of tea, big cozy sweaters, that’s what they got. This book is pretty but doesn’t get much beyond that. It feels like a marriage between Wikipedia entries and Shutterstock photos. I feel it would have been better as a tongue-in-cheek book like Stuff White People Like or a big, juicy coffee table book with lots of golden hour shots of people skating and sipping hot chocolate. But it’s not tongue in cheek at all (as I feel the whole trend kind of is… or should be) and it’s not quite all-in on hygge either. Didn’t give me the hygge hit I was jonesing for, basically.
3.The Street Beneath My Feetby Charlotte Guillain and Yuval Zommer. My three-year old has been asking “Daddy, what’s under our house?” a lot lately and my wife Leslie picked up this perfect book to answer his questions. The book was just published a few weeks ago but I feel like it’s going to be a huge classic as the entire gigantic hardcover unfolds like an accordion and takes you all the way into the center of the Earth on one side of the pages and then back again on the other side. I’ve never seen a book like it. Water pipes, subway trains, archaeological treasures, gold mines, and the layers of the Earth are all explored in a real sumptuous visual feast. New permanent book on the kid’s shelf.
4. Wilson by Daniel Clowes. This is the latest graphic novel from Daniel Clowes but it’s a bit depressing to read the life story of a constantly angry person. Unless you’re there yourself, which I guess I wasn’t when I read this. I love the ups and downs but this felt like mostly downs. Still, the format and style is enough to get excited about. Clowes tells the biographical story of Wilson through a series of one-page comic strips of various formats. There are all kinds of little windows into design and communication here. Some are realistically stylized (like his famous Ghost World), some are like L’il Jinx cartoon boxes from Archie Comics, and some are just strange experiments.
5. Leadership BS by Jeffrey Pfeffer. I took a course at Harvard called “Power and Influence in Organizations” and everything in the class was written by Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, the longtime Stanford prof who teaches Paths to Power. A rare example of a Harvard class going off market. It felt like drinking a smuggled Coke in the Pepsi head office. Anyway, this book is his latest and paints a dystopian portrait of the state of corporate culture and the leadership “industry” (which he somewhat vaguely defines as the billions spent on training and developing leaders.) His point is that nothing’s working. Lies, deceit, arrogance – these are the traits of those at the top and he explains why those traits actually help them get ahead even if we pretend they don’t. If you’re struggling in a corporate gig this is a great read because it demystifies who gets power inside companies and every statement is underpinned by a quality research study. What can we do about it? A bit thin at the end but it advocates for leaderless systems and built in self-interest inside organizations. Setting those up is the tough part.
6. All Our Wrong Todaysby Elan Mastai. I used to edit a weekly comedy paper called Golden Words back at Queen’s University. It was built up over decades by a lot of blood, sweat, and tears from people before me. Elan Mastai was one of those people. He edited it in the 90s and graduated before I arrived but we connected when I became a fan of his Toronto comedy troupe maybe fifteen years back. We then lost touch until only a few weeks ago when we reconnected on Twitter and I noticed he got a seven-figure book deal (!) … for his debut novel (!) … which just came out (!). I ordered it right away and it didn’t disappoint. A fast-paced, mindbending time-travel book that reminded me of The Martianand Dark Matter. (There’s even a glowing blurb by Martian author Andy Weir on the back.) The pace of the book just keeps accelerating and seemingly goes faster and faster the deeper you go. I can’t recommend it enough.
7. Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever by Tad Friend. This is one of those gigantic 20-page articles in The New Yorker that takes me an entire flight to read. It was worth it, though. By the end I felt like I was living in this strange world of emerging science and questionable practices that (maybe not surprisingly) is entirely based in California. I cannot imagine how long it took to research this article because you go from shady labs funded by billionaires to parties with Hollywood celebs discussing and researching how we can all live a few extra decades… at least. Spoiler alert: It’s proving to be a little more challenging than we though.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Hope you’re having a great month. Spring is in the air, the flowers are popping through, and 2017 feels like it’s just zipping by. I’m excited to share this month’s books with you below. Also, three cheers to New Zealand for calling me an American in a headline.
As always, drop me a line with any feedback or thoughts. I read and reply to every one.
Talk to you soon,
Neil
1. East of Edenby John Steinbeck. Crazy story. I was sitting at a bar a few weeks ago and I started chatting with the guy next to me. The conversation turned to books and we learned we shared a taste for writers like David Mitchell and Haruki Murakami. I got excited and said “So, what’s your favorite novel of all time?” and, you know, it’s a tough question, but he peeled back the top of his shirt and revealed a gigantic tattoo of a tree branch. “What’s that?” I asked. And he said “East of Eden. John Steinbeck. This is a tattoo of the cover of the book.” I didn’t have a moment to really gather the fact that he had a book cover tattooed on his body before the bartender shouted “No way!” She came up to us and pulled up her shirt sleeve and revealed some indecipherable quote. “From East of Eden!” she said excitedly. “I got it on my arm.” I don’t quite remember what my reaction was but I think it was something like “If two random strangers who don’t know each other both have a book permanently tattooed on their body, then I really have to read that book.” I picked it up from a used bookstore open till midnight near my house and started it as soon as I got home. It blew me away and I was honestly sobbing by the time I read the last page. The book is almost seventy years old but gave me the same feeling as reading a book like The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Long, fast-paced biographical type narration that twists and ties together with giant themes of fatalism versus free will sitting on top. In High Fidelity fashion, East of Eden has suddenly crashed into my top five novels. An absolutely must read. One of those books you’ll look back on and go “How did I not read that before?”
2.How To Loveby Thich Nhat Hanh. The prolific Zen monk’s simple little paragraphs about mindful and compassionate love. I loved flipping through this and pulling out occasional gems. Stick it in your bathroom and guests will think you’re enlightened.
3.The Selloutby Paul Beatty. Can you trust awards? Maybe you already knew the answer was no. I just found out again. We need curated lists, filtering mechanisms. Some way to make the infinite manageable. So I was starting to think that the Man Booker Prize was my ticket to great books every year. Past nominees have been books I’ve truly loved like A Fraction Of The Wholeand Life of Pi. So when I found out that this year’s winner was a fast-paced and funny satire on race in the States, I was so excited to dive in. And then I spectacularly failed to enjoy any part of this book. I believe you should quit books and quit books often but I didn’t take my own advice here. I did the classic ten more pages, ten more pages, ten more pages sputter. The plot was too wild for me to follow, the characters too unrelatable, the satire about bringing back segregation and slavery too far out for me. So why am I including it in this book club? It gets points for pulling me through. And the crazy wordplay is a lot of fun. But combined with White Noise last month I’ve got to stop doing that. Quit more!
4. Unshakeableby Tony Robbins. I walked into the Barnes & Nobles in TriBeCa this month and came face to face with Tony Robbins. Every poster, wall sign, and book featured his giant smiling face. It was a bit unnerving. I wondered what it would be like to walk into a bookstore and it’s just you… everywhere. I figured I at least owed the guy a cursory little skim of his new book and I ended up standing there reading the whole thing. On one hand: If a book holds your attention all the way through while you’re standing in a bookstore… kudos! On the other hand… I didn’t buy it. For me it didn’t offer a ton of new investment information and didn’t come close to my favorite investing book which is The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John Bogle. The world is getting more busy and scattered so I feel like I need my books to be less all over the place than my real life. This book felt like someone’s hard drive threw up and was a jumble of listicles and interviews amidst fist-pumping rallying cries. I have nothing against the content itself but couldn’t quite take it home.
5. Think Like A Bronze Medalist, Not Silverby Derek Sivers. One of my favorite writers with a gem of a little essay out last week. Great perspective on gratitude versus ambition and I’ve already called it to mind a few times since reading it.
6. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketingby Al Ries and Jack Trout. After hearing Tim Ferriss trumpet this old marketing book for years on his podcast I finally picked it up. In a way, it’s straight out of the early 90s, complete with grainy author profile pics with giant hair and boxy glasses and fresh case studies featuring New Coke and Dell Computers. But, in another way, it’s timeless and simple marketing advice. The Law of Focus talks about the importance of owning a word in the marketplace. The Law of Duality talks about how number three players never make it long term. My favorite phrase of the whole book was: “The target is not the market” which explains the difference between who you’re aiming for (super high-performance athletes) and who actually buys (the chubby guy who wants to run around the block). Marketing is changing so fast so it’s nice to read something grounding. If you can get past case studies about Atari and Remington Typewriters, this flipper is a great overview.
7. Selfish Reasons To Have More Kidsby Bryan Caplan. What happens when you ask an economist to look at declining global birthrates? You get this intriguing, imperfect look at why having more kids is a great thing. (He’s not trying to convert the child-free crowd, but get those who already want kids to just want more.) He starts by showing how modern parents are martyrs and most of the overinvestments made in parenting make zero difference on how kids end up, based on twin and adoption studies. You don’t matter much! And then he whips through all kinds of reasons to have larger families while cautioning against making rash decisions in the particularly painful early parenting years. Like any parenting book, there are lots of things to disagree with. I found his tone preachy (he skims past sleep challenges with a couple sentences about the Ferber Method, for instance) but overall there is a lot to like. A key question underpinning the book is: “How many kids do you want when you’re 60?” and he points out that 60 isn’t much past current middle age. We’ll be in the enjoying kids, rather than the raising kids, stage of life much longer than any generation ever has… never mind enjoying grandkids or beyond. The real gem of the book is the final chapter which shows off an amazing trick: He stages roleplay style roundtable chats with a roomful of extremely harsh critics of his arguments. He says he based these chats on his own discussions with friends as he shared the book and, basically, got his ideas bashed in. He knows his arguments are lightning rods but I’ve never seen such a powerful finishing move outside of Mortal Kombat. It’s incredibly convincing. If you’re a skimmer, his detailed introduction, detailed conclusion, and that final roleplay chapter are enough to get most of the argument.
8. The Iron Manby Ted Hughes. Not that Iron Man! This is the original. At least I think it’s the original. An award-winning kid’s chapter book published in 1968 about a misunderstood giant iron man who arrives out of nowhere, tumbles down a cliff, gets buried by fearful townspeople, rescued by a little boy, and then ultimately rescues the planet. Phew! Wonderful book on so many levels. Thrilling storyline, beautiful writing, wondrous imagery. After Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, this is right up there for kids. My big issue on books I’m reading to my almost three-year-old is I just don’t want them to be boring. This is anything but.
9. What To Do When It’s Your Turn (And It’s Always Your Turn)by Seth Godin. This book is an instant dose of energy for your next project. You can flip through and read it in an hour or two. Felt like a combination of a Kid President Pep Talk with The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. A visually beautiful book from one of the masters of taking risks, starting businesses, and just doing it. Loved it.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
I got this email after sending out last month’s book club email:
Hi Neil,
I've been a lover of 1000awesomethings.com for 6 years now and I have bought your books as gifts on several occasions, so thank you so much! I am really enjoying your monthly book recommendations and I have a question. Did you read all of these books in December? And if so, how do you read so many books in one month? How much time do you spend reading a day? I am trying to read more this year and I am interested to learn how you do it as I know you are very busy and if you can do it, I'm sure I can too. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.
Best regards,
Erick Jackaman
Well, massive shoutout to Erick (for the note and for letting me share it) because it caused me to write a new article for Harvard Business Review called “8 Ways To Read (A Lot) More Books This Year.” The article got some traction and now there are a couple thousand more of you reading along as a result. (Hey, guys!)
Hope you enjoy this month’s books,
Neil
1. There Is No Good Card For This: What To Say and Do When Life is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Loveby Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell. Have you heard of Empathy Cards? Emily McDowell started the company making perfectly articulate and hilarious greeting cards. Her new book – tag-teamed with empathy expert Dr. Kelsey Crowe – perfectly brings to life those same themes around empathy and compassion and is sprinkled with hilarious drawings throughout. Just came out and getting serious press. Feels like it should be a mandatory book for others whenever you’re going through a tough time in life. (Sidenote: The book reminds me a lot of this great article I cut out of the New York Times over five years ago.)
2.How Not To Write: The Essential Misrules of Grammarby William Safire. Did you ever read the On Language column in The New York Times Magazine? It was a thing of beauty. One full page, every week, examining every detail of a different word from all angles. Written by William Safire, Pulitizer-Prize winning journalist, former Presidential speechwriter, and NYT columnist for forty years. He died in 2006. (Sidenote: One of my most prized moments while writing The Happiness Equation was getting a letter from his 90+ year old widow allowing me to use some of his “Never Retire” Op-Ed in the book.) This book is a treasure. It contains fifty grammar rules like “#50 Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague” and “#27 Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.” The whole book is completely meta since he’s constantly using and stylistically breaking his examples. A fave example from #44 De-accession euphemisms: “The U.S. Embassy in Budapest used to hand each arriving diplomat a packet that included this warning: ‘It must be assumed that available casual indigenous female companions work for or cooperate with the Hungarian government security establishment.’ It would have been better for our counterintelligence efforts if somebody had said, ‘The local whores are spies.’” Fun book for grammar junkies.
3.The Roadby Cormac McArthy. I remember watching the Coen Brothers go onstage at the 2007 Oscars to accept Best Adapted Screenplay for No Country For Old Men. I had seen that movie. It scared the crap out of me. They smiled and said something like “We just take works of genius by other people. Cormac McArthy wrote this! We just filmed it!” And I was like, “Who’s Cormac McArthy? That thing was a book? Why haven’t I heard of it?” And then I realized it’s because nobody has heard of any book, on average. Most people can maybe name the top five movies last year. I’ve never met a person who could do this with books. My point is the Movie-To-Author-Effect really is a great discovery mechanism. In this millions-of-books available era, we need whatever filtering we can get. Cormac McArthy lodged in my head from that Oscar speech a decade ago so I casually did The First Five Pages Test on The Road and was hooked. Dark, sparse, brooding, touching. How does a book this long contain almost no commas? Amazingly spare writing about a father and son walking a dark and lonely road in the US a few years after a fiery apocalypse wiped out nearly everything. Doesn’t sound like a heartwarmer but produces incredible feelings of appreciation, gratitude, awe, and love for the world around us like almost nothing else.
4. Danny the Champion of the Worldby Roald Dahl. I can still fondly remember my first grade teacher Miss McKay reading James and the Giant Peach to us on the ugly green linty carpet in our classroom. I got hooked on Roald Dahl back then so I enjoyed this Telegraph ranking of the sixteen best Roald Dahl books. I realized there were a ton I hadn’t read so picked this one up at the library. It seems like the book is about poor Danny living in a one-room trailer with his dad and plotting the greatest ever pheasant poaching hunt on the land of the local ruthless billionaire. But it’s really just about the beauty of true love between father and son. I loved it and actually found it inspiring on how to be a more fun and upbeat dad.
5. Coachby Michael Lewis. You know how you used to double-space your essays and increase the margins to make it look bigger? This book did that. Giant font, double spacing, and even a few unrelated stock images for good measure. “Why is that old man crying into a catcher’s mitt? This was never discussed!” It’s really just a long Vanity Fair article stretched into a book. Really great read, though. Michael Lewis was fascinated that while everyone in his generation loved his old high school coach (alumni had just finishing raising money to build a gym in his name), somehow all the parents of the current generation were trying to get him fired. Why? The answer is a beautifully articulated story about what we used to trust and need coaches to do – find and develop our most cherished values through trial and tough love – and how we don’t make space for that type of growth anywhere in our lives anymore. It’s more than a “special snowflake” piece though. There is real heart, beauty, and subtlety in this tale. You’ll read it in an hour and it’s perfect for parents or teachers. A gem.
6. Steal The Showby Michael Port. I picked this book up in an airport and expected a couple nuggets on giving keynote speeches. It delivered a lot more. The sub-headline is “From speeches to job interviews to deal-closing pitches, how to guarantee a standing ovation for all the performances in your life.” Michael Port shares lessons learned as an actor and applies them to giving speeches. Biggest value is when he lays out the detailed, step-by-step approach to developing a new keynote speech from scratch. If you have a big speech coming up (and a few months to prepare for it) then this is a great pickup.
7. The Wonderful Things You Will Beby Emily Winfield Martin. Most kid’s books have two names on the cover. Writer! Illustrator! So I’m already impressed when I stumble on a great kid’s book with only one name on the front. I can’t believe someone was talented enough to do both. This is a beautifully poetic hymn to a child’s potential from the perspective of a loving parent. I can read it over and over with my older son.
8. We Are Not Materialistic Enoughby David Cain. I told Leslie when I met her that I hated winter. “Too cold!” I’d say, shivering in my flimsy coat and thin Walmart boots that turned my toes into ice cubes. “You don’t hate Winter,” she said. “You just have crappy boots.” She convinced me to buy a good quality pair and six years later they’re as good as new. I love walking in them. My feet are never cold. They’ve completely changed my view. And that’s the exact philosophy underpinning this article I loved by David Cain who authors the popular blog Raptitude: Getting Better At Being Human.
9. White Noiseby Don DeLillo. A National Book Award winning novel written in 1984 that was honestly just a slog for me to get through. If I don’t finish a book (which happens a lot) then I don’t include it in this email. But with this book I kept saying “Ten more pages” over and over and over until I was done. It’s a comic look at the various phobias of the age that really doesn’t feel outdated at all. Technology taking over, chemical spills, and the big shrink-wrapped capitalistic squeeze over everything. Crisp confident writing with twisted characters and plotlines. I got lost in it a few times but liked it enough that I’d still recommend it to those of you on the more literary side than me…
10.The Sun Is Also A Starby Nicola Yoon. Do you know that balcony scene in Annie Hallwhere Alvy and Annie are hitting on each other and all their awkward little phrases are subtitled with their actual thoughts? Well, this whole Young Adult book is written like that. Two-page chapter from his perspective, two-page chapter from hers. It’s the story of one day in the life of two star-crossed teenage lovers meetings in New York City as one is being deported as an illegal immigrant and the other has his big interview to get into Yale. It was a fun read but a big part was just about momentum. Since I struggled to get through White Noise above I needed a moving-sidewalk book to get my pace back up. This one did the trick. If you liked the final scene of Six Feet Under where they give flash-forwards of all the characters, you’ll probably like this book.
11.Brave Enoughby Cheryl Strayed. Beautiful, simple, profane book of snappy quotes from the author of Wild. Three examples: “If it is impossible to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have,” “Our most meaningful relationships are often those that continued beyond the juncture at which they came closest to ending,” and “Love can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued by sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor, and loaded by promises and commitments that we may or may not want to keep. The best thing you can possibly do with your life is tackle the [motherbleeping bleep] out of it.”
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Happy new year!
Hope you had some downtime (and reading time) over the holidays. Here’s what I read and enjoyed this month.
Neil
1. The Little Princeby Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. When I was a kid my older cousin handed me this book and said “Read it now and when you’re older it’ll mean something completely different.” Well, I finally reread this book. There’s a reason it’s sold 80 million copies. Really profound commentary on the busyness of society, what love really means, and the value of friendship. Two insane facts I didn’t know: The book is a parable about a downed pilot lost in a desert stumbling upon a little Prince … and the author really did down his plane in a desert and wander around dehydrated and hallucinating until he was rescued. And then, a year after he wrote this book, he was piloting another plane that completely vanished! The wreckage was found fifty years later in the Mediterranean Sea. So he wrote a parable about a plane crash that became one of the bestselling books of all time… between two horrific plane crashes of his own.
2.Pretentiousness: Why It Mattersby Dan Fox. Title sounds like a turnoff. But that’s the point. An incredibly well-written essay on the history, purpose, and joy of the creative process. Pretentiousness – the testing and adding your art and ideas to the world – is where everything good comes from. My view of the word itself and what it means completely shifted. Book is only 100 pages but not “light” at all. Veers to the academic side. Chock full of nuggets. Voted one of the New York Times Notable Books of 2016, too.
3.Barney’s Versionby Mordecai Richler. I loved The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz when I was younger. That was the only other Mordecai Richler book I’d read until this… and this blows the roof off that one. It took me a couple tries to get in because the first person narration is so acidic and scorching. Very funny but almost too dark for me. But page by page Barney grows on you and this fictional “righting of wrongs” memoir reveals all kinds of hidden storylines, quiet love, and almost unbelievably beautiful writing as he shares his life story in three sections dedicated to his three wives. This is the only novel I can recall that just killed it across both Canada and US awards circuits (Giller / NYT Notable) and it’s easy to see why. A masterwork. Sad he wrote no novels a decade before this and no novels afterwards until his death so this gem stands on a lonely island. I’ll treasure it on my shelf always.
4. The Reason I Jumpby Naoki Higashida and translated by David Mitchell. According to the introduction, this is the only book ever written about autism … by someone with autism. Japanese teenager Naoki Higashida wrote this book with a Japanese alphabet pad and an assistant, one character at a time, and you can feel that slow tenderness and passion as he answers question after question. Why do people with autism talk so loudly and weirdly? Why don’t you make eye contact while talking? What’s the reason you jump? I said before I’ve loved David Mitchell since Cloud Atlas, so I originally found this book while searching for bibliographical scraps. I was in for a major surprise. In the introduction David Mitchell shares how his son has severe autism and he, like many, struggled to identify, relate, and support his child… until he read this book. He then worked with his wife to translate it at the request of friends and the book found a giant Western audience after Jon Stewart trumpeted it on The Daily Show and it hit The New York Times bestseller list. Completely expanded my perception of being human with an entirely new worldview. Must, must, must-read.
5. Hyperbole and a Halfby Allie Brosch. There are just too many books out there so I’m always looking for curated lists. That’s why I do this email. That’s why I love Ryan Holiday’s Monthly Email List. And that’s why I scanned Bill Gates’s GatesNotes and found this gem in the vein of David Sedaris or Jenny Lawson’s autobiographical hilarity. This feels like an evolution on those books with edge comedy scattered across Microsoft Paint-style cartoons. Despite the visual format the content is pretty meaty and even heavy. Emotionally I could only read one or two stories at a time. Amazing introspection on the human condition especially on topics such as mental illness, anxiety, and maybe the best essay I’ve ever read on depression. Unique and unexpected. PS Don’t judge this one by the cover!
6. Home Gameby Michael Lewis. I miss my family when I’m traveling. High up in some cold airplane I often find myself scrolling through home videos on my cell phone. Well, this book felt like I was home while traveling. An insightful take at being a modern father with its evolving mix of expectations and responsibilities. There is so much truth in this book that it’s hard not to feel both occasionally inferior and superior. (He has a great mini-essay on those feelings, too.) It’s divided into one section for each of his three kids with a final Epilogue detailing his vasectomy. Uh, yeah. I haven’t read a ton of Michael Lewis but I’m guessing that last chapter may be the funniest thing he’s written.
7. Boo Hoo Birdby Jeremy Tankard. Looks like your average ho-hum children’s picture book (and I thought it was) but has one of the most subtle messages about empathy hidden inside. When Bird gets bonked on the head playing catch all his animal friends take turns trying to help – offering a cookie, slapping on a Band-Aid, trying to play Hide-And-Seek. But nothing works until all the other animals start crying too. And then Bird finally feels better. There are no closing thoughts or morals hitting you with a hammer here. Just a nice message weaved in.
8. Love Is A Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield. Funny, sad, beautiful memoir about a guy who gets married young and becomes a widow soon after. (Not a spoiler as it’s revealed on the first page!) The story of indie music, mix tapes, and rock concerts is weaved through the book and it’ll appeal to anyone who’s ever been in a relationship where music was a big part of the story. Written by a contributing editor to Rolling Stone so it’s in that same light, jumpy, and funny style of writing.
9. The Fermi Paradoxby Tim Urban. I love going to the blog Wait But Why when my mind needs a complete zoom out. Tim Urban has a great writing style that completely reduces whatever you’re worrying about to interplanetary dust or maybe just shifts it to some giant fear you didn't know you had. Have you ever wondered why we’ve never seen or heard from aliens? Then this is for you.
10.Civil Disobedience and Other Essaysby Henry David Thoreau. You know those cardboard boxes of free books people leave in front of their house? I usually peek in expecting a pile of yellowed Harlequins but once in a while spot a gem like this thin volume of essays by Henry David Thoreau. The title essay is great but my favorite is Walking (link goes to full text) and it’s a fiery piece on the philosophical, meditative, and creative benefits of… walking. Leslie and I picked our house based on what we could walk to and I try and do most of my meetings walking. So this essay hit home. (Sidenote: Nassim Taleb also has a great essay on urban walking at the back of The Black Swan expanded paperback edition.) As Thoreau says: “We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.”
11.Sad Animal Factsby Brooke Barker. Fun little bathroom book with weird animal facts combined with hilarious straight-faced line drawings and quips. Like “Koi fish can live 200 years” with a drawing of a Koi fish saying “72,500 more days of exploring this decorative pond.”
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Hope you’re having a good month and gearing up for the holidays.
Thanks so much for all the feedback after my Book Club email last month. Your notes pushed me into another batch of books this month which I’m excited to share below. Also, total aside, my brand new TED Talk “How Do You Maximize Your Tiny, Short Life?” is live!
Happy holidays and happy reading.
Neil
1. The Art of Livingby Epictetus. Last March I stayed in a hotel called The Taj in San Francisco during my book tour. Indian chain. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I pulled open the top drawer of the bedside table and there was a copy of The Vedas lying there. But it was strangely jarring. I’ve been used to seeing Bibles in hotel rooms my whole life. And then suddenly there was something else. “Hmmm,” I thought, “It’s not the Bible, necessarily, it’s a thousands-of-years old guidebook of stories and lessons for people sleeping far from home.” That got me thinking. What book would I put in the bedside table of my own hotel chain? What would you put? I never answered the question until now. I think it has to be The Art of Livingby Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca may hog the Stoic philosophy press, but I’ve found great joy paging through this two-thousand year old book of simple philosophical notes written by a slave born on the edges of the Roman Empire in 55 AD. It’s a perfect book to flip through before falling asleep or after waking up in the morning if you can spare a few minutes before getting out of bed. Part of the appeal is that , despite being written so long ago, the translation feels like an email you got this morning from a wise friend. Sample entry to share a taste: “It is better to do wrong seldom and to own it, and to act right for the most part, than seldom to admit that you have done wrong and to do wrong often.” (More sample entries here.)
2.Dark Matterby Blake Crouch. I was complaining to my friend Alec a while back about Lost. You know, twisting plotlines, endless branches, totally confusing TV show. “Yeah, but you’re thinking about it in terms of plot,” he said. “It’s a character show. It’s not about plot.” Since then I always thought this was a fun little scale to think about. Plot vs Character. Overly simplistic, for sure, but a kind mental model that lets a lot more art into my life. In fiction I’ve lately veered to more character based stuff so Dark Matter was a nice rubber band snap back. It’s all plot. Plot, plot, plot. I don’t even think we know what the characters look like. But the plot in Dark Matter sizzles like frying bacon. Hot, loud, fills the room, jumps up and bites your wrist here and there. This is the fastest paced book I’ve read this year. Reminded me of reading The Martian or old suspenseful Michael Crichton books. (Anyone else still thinking about the ending to Sphere?) I felt like it was a bit predictable at the beginning but he has enough twists and turns that the ending feels completely wild and results in an ultimately beautiful story about love and regret wrapped in a crispy sci-fi phyllo pastry crust. Fantastic fun.
3.How To Develop Self-Confidence & Influence People by Public Speakingby Dale Carnegie. If you’re like me you know and probably enjoyed How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. This book was written before that one and is a lot lesser known unless you went to a Carnegie course. (By the way, Warren Buffet calls the Dale Carnegie course he took his most important degree.) I think this book is gold, honestly. Timeless advice that shows how to make a speech about the listener. That’s the key. Favorite chapters were templates with examples on how to open and close speeches (i.e., Arouse curiosity, share a human interest story, use an exhibit, share a shocking quote or fact, etc.) Super easy read. Perfect for anyone shoulder-tapped for a toast at a wedding all the way up to the corporate honcho in the big hat.
4. Hereby Richard McGuire. We all think in pictures, right? That’s all babies have! And then they grow into picture books. When images become too complicated to draw – the nuance of emotions, the fast pace of a long plot, whatever – we move to chapter books, then YA, then whatever you’re reading now. Where are the pictures? Still there. Just in our heads. I think it’s because of this picture-brain mindset I’ve always been attracted to graphic novels like Killing and Dyingby Adrian Tomine or Ghost Worldby Daniel Clowes. Realistic characters, strong plotlines, major emotions of good fiction, all complemented with realistically beautiful images and no superhero tights. That’s what makes Here such an incredible graphic novel with a really strange hook: every page is a snapshot of the exact same location at a different time in history. Native Americans have sex in the forest, construction of a century home begins on another, a man keels over in the 1970s rec room after someone tells a joke. Little boxes on each page give glimpses of what happened exactly here at other times, too. On most pages it’s within that century home but it often goes way farther into the past and future, too. Planet formation to post-apocalypse. It’s no comic book. And there’s no plot. It’s a guided meditation that dilates your brain into zooming way further out from wherever you happen to be. Where are you while reading this email? I guarantee you’ll be somewhere else after reading this book. I loved it. (Wired did a great overview of it, too.)
5. How To Be Successfulby Scott Adams. I reread this Wall Street Journal article by Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) this month. I bookmarked it a long time ago because it’s such a great and funny overview of why systems are better than goals.
6. Purityby Jonathan Franzen. 2016 was my Franzen Year. I read The Corrections,Freedom, and now Purityfrom January till now and not a single word he wrote before then. Don’t you love discovering an author and then realizing you’ve got a whole biography of theirs to explore? Purityis all kinds of layered emotional regression after emotional regression. We follow a character for a hundred pages only to regress into the backstory of the person she meets at the end of the hundred pages only to regress into the backstory of the person they meet at the end of the next hundred pages. Even though the book is Franzen’s usual 600 page paperweight there really wasn’t much wasted space until the end. His ability to describe personalities is so strong. You feel like you know these people better than your own family at times. Their secret desires, their shattered confidences, their disgusting thoughts. I felt like a better husband and dad while reading this book – feeling lucky for what I have and more grateful for the love around me in a world of heartbroken people. For anyone who hasn’t read Franzen’s stuff, I’d personally recommend this only after The Corrections and Freedom. Doesn’t quite get to the level of those two though it’s not far off.
7. Both Flesh and Notby David Foster Wallace. For years I tried and failed to get into David Foster Wallace. I tackled Infinite Jest like a mountain and slipped down the rocky hills just above base camp. It taunted me from my bookshelf for years. (Here’s a fantastic piece written recently about Infinite Jest for the twentieth year anniversary.) I loved the little bits and pieces of David Foster Wallace I’d read over the years (like his incredible This Is Water commencement speech) and was always looking for a new way into his writing. Now I have it. This book. It’s a collection of non-fiction essays he wrote for outlets like The New York Times Magazine and they are flabbergastingly beautiful and intense. The title essay is about Roger Federer at the beginning of his tennis career. It’s like nothing I’ve read before on sports. He has a funny essay on the seminal importance of Terminator 2. His collection of “word notes” on commonly misused words. And my favorite is his essay called The Nature Of The Fun which is about the emotional roller coaster of the creative process after having success in the creative process. (Brainpickings did a nice overview of it here.) Any of those essays are worth the price of admission alone. This is truly original, high-flying, mind-bogglingly good writing. Now I really need to tackle Infinite Jestagain…
8. The Verificationistby Donald Antrim. This was one of the strangest, most frustrating, and most emotional novels I’ve read this year. Completely absurdist comedy written by Antrim who is a longtime New Yorker writer, Professor at Brown, and MacArthur Fellow. Tom is a middle-aged psychotherapist hosting all his pschyotherapist buddies for a big night at the local pancake house. When he tries to start a food fight he’s put in a bear hug by a coworker and the rest of the book trips into a hallucination with him flying around the top of the restaurant looking down at the group. I kept wanting to just quit the book (I probably quit three or four books for every one I finish…) but something was strangely gripping about it. Real characters, blunt unflinching dialogue, psychosexual tension. And there are no chapters or any kind of mental resting stops to actually jump out of this car while it’s moving. If this is all starting to sound strange then let me tell you the book is actually a lot stranger than it sounds.
9. Before and Afterby Anne-Margot Ramstein & Matthias Aregui. When I wrote my children’s book Awesome Is Everywhere last year my editor warned me: “Everyone buys the classics.” You know how it is. Grandaddy grew up with Goodnight Moon, Auntie Pat’s Patted The Bunny for decades. So when it’s time for them to buy a gift for their grandchild or nephew, they defer to what they know, and the cycle continues. Kid’s classics get bigger and the cornucopia of contemporary delights gets routinely overlooked. But then, why are there so many new picture books and why are so many so good? I think it’s because even though advances and royalties are much smaller, because of market size and jackpot rate, the people doing them really are doing it for love. You can feel the TLC oozing off the pages. And Before and After is a book oozing with TLC. First off, no words appear at all in the entire book. On the left side of each page is an artistically clean drawing of something before -- like an acorn, caterpillar, or egg. On the right side is something after – like an oak tree, butterfly, or chicken. Some are obvious, some aren’t, all provoke great conversation. The bookseller who recommended it to me said it’s her favorite children’s book because it serves such a wide age, language, and development range. She didn’t mention parents but I love it, too. A great go-to gift for friends with kids because hardly anyone has heard of it. Beats Goodnight Moon any night.
Neil's Monthly Book Club is my oldest and most popular email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Hey everyone,
Hope you’re having a good month.
If you’re getting this it means you joined my email list sometime over the past few years through 1000 Awesome Thingsor maybe aBook of Awesomeor Happiness Equationevent. I’ve had fun sending more than 20,000 of you very sporadic updates through this email list … but they really have been sporadic. Really sporadic. Too sporadic.
I feel like inboxes are increasingly sacred spaces in our endlessly buzzing world. Think of how angry we get at spam and how good it feels to unsubscribe from seven email lists all at once. That is true freedom. I know I’m in your sacred space right now so you’ll find no handcuffs, no ads, no spam here. Just me to you. Feel free to unsubscribe below if this isn’t your thing or forward to your mom if you like it.
Why a monthly reading club? Because I love reading and so do you. You are reading this, after all. I’m in your brain right now and I’m not even there. I might be sleeping. That’s amazing. That’s reading. I love reading this much and this much and this much and this much and I feel like books are the greatest bargain in the universe. For a few dollars or a library card you can change a mind, expand a brain, share all kinds of emotions. But there’s so much out there … and we’re publishing more books faster and faster than ever before. So how do we find the gems we end up loving? I know I rely on advice of friends and subscribe to some great lists like Ryan Holiday’s Reading Email and Austin Kleon’s Newsletter which serve as inspiration for this one.
That’s the background on this new email. I’d love to hear what you think. Here goes nothing.
And now this month’s recommendations…
Neil
1. The War of Artby Steven Pressfield. I’ve been hearing about this book for years and finally read it on a flight. Absolutely amazing. A completely simple guide to battling “Resistance” – the single word Pressfield uses to describe the set of emotions and barriers preventing you from doing work you love. Within pages you’ll want to drop everything and tackle a creative project you’ve been thinking about starting. An example? This reading club email. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and The War of Art was the perfect push.
2.Black Swan Greenby David Mitchell. I’m a sucker for coming of age stories. The Fault In Our Stars? The Perks of Being A Wallflower? Sign me up. I visit lists like this often to find new ones. I think because those years are so formative I just feel the need to relive them over and over in different ways. Well, Black Swan Green is my current favorite coming-of-age story. David Mitchell had me at Cloud Atlasand this novel is just blissfully beautiful. We follow 13-year-old anxiety-prone stutterer Jason through a single up and down year in rural England in 1982. Unlike most of his other books Mitchell doesn’t shapeshift voice and characters in this one and I think the narrative voice is (somehow) even stronger as a result. Sample line: “Graveyards’re sardined with rotting bodies, so of course they’re scary places. A bit. But few things’re only one thing if you think about them long enough.”
3.The Black Swanby Nassim Taleb. If I was teaching a course in life, philosophy, economics, motivation, or psychology, this would be a mandatory textbook. I avoid pretty wide swaths of the Business section – have read too many expanded magazine articles with one basic idea on Page 150 – but this gem rises head and shoulders above the rest. The opening paragraph explains how the entire Western world thought all swans were white… until a black swan was spotted. He defines black swan events as events which 1) are disproportionately huge, 2) cannot be predicted, and 3) are mistakenly explained in retrospect with hindsight and fallacies. Examples range from 9/11 to “how you met your spouse.” The book is just absolutely exploding with ideas and reality-shattering views and carries the feeling of being written in “blue collar” language by one of the brightest economics / chaos / risk theory minds in the world. Occasionally the book can be too sprawling or chaotic seeming itself but think of this read as a wild roller coaster, not a slow and straight drive. Absolutely life changing.
4. A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers. A super quick, tightly written, emotionally suspenseful parable of modern day family tensions against the backdrop of a globalizing world. First person narrative as struggling businessman Alan Clay travels to Saudi Arabia for “the one big sale” and revisits his life up to that point. I love Dave Eggers but really hadn’t heard of this book until it was recommended to me by a great bookseller. One of his fastest reads for sure. It’s slapped with all kinds of awards like Finalist for the National Book Award and a NYT Book Review’s 10 Best. Movie starring Tom Hanks came out in April and looks unfortunately like a bomb ($30M budget, $5M box office, according to IMDB). So, as always, go with the source material!
5. Yo! Yes?by Chris Raschka. Beautiful children’s book showing how easy it is to make friends. My wife Leslie is an elementary school teacher who has been using this book for years. It’s super short with maybe a dozen pages and only a word or two per page. (Yo! Yes? You! Me? Yes, you! No fun. Oh? No friends. Oh! … Me? You? Me! ... Yes! Etc.) Really great to read and discuss with my two year old. Written and illustrated by Chris Raschka who may be more well known for his A Ball for Daisyseries and The Hello Goodbye Window.Both of those are also great.
6. Showerthoughts. Do you remember Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey? Concise, bizarre, hilarious one-liners like “The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw” or “We like to praise birds for flying. But how much of it is actually flying, and how much of it is just sort of coasting from the previous flap?” I loved those on Saturday Night Live when I was a kid and still have an old Deep Thoughtsbook. I get excited if I see a Jack Handey piece in The New Yorker. A wild and entertaining writer. And funny sidenote: Jack Handey’s has a button on it called “Is there a real Jack Handey?” Okay, where am I going with all this? Well, the Shower Thoughts Subreddit feels like our collective Deep Thoughts. When I’m in a frustratingly long line I click over to the Most Popular Shower Thoughts from the past month and always laugh out loud. One of a few sites I actually bookmark.
7. Be Preparedby Gary Greenberg. Whenever a friend tells me they’re about to become a dad I say “Congrats!” and then send them this book. Looks like a back-of-the-joke-shop flipper for that clichéd “stoopid dad.” But buried within the writing and hilarious drawings is solid parenting advice. It was the only parenting book I read cover to cover before being a dad and still flip through it. Great for any dad to be.
