Chapter 137: Jonathan Franzen finds fellow freaks and forges fantastic fiction

Are you ready for a writing masterclass from one of the best self-help writers in the world?   After graduating from Cambridge, Oliver Burkeman wrote the popular column “This Column Will Change Your Life” in ‘The Guardian’ for over 15 years sharing his real-world, real-time poetic exploration of the self-help universe. In 2021 he published 'Four Thousand Weeks,' a literary examination of how we live today. Mark Manson (our guest in Chapter 28) called it “a reality check on our culture’s crazy assumptions around work, productivity and living a meaningful life” and Adam Grant (our guest in Chapter 72) called it “the most important book ever written about time management."   Oliver's work is much more about how to live a good life in the limited time we have than the system and hacks you find in other popular productivity books, and he’s just released a wonderful follow-up called 'Meditations For Mortals.' This book offers the reader 28 short chapters meant to be read one a day for 28 days, a quiet evening ritual with Oliver's potent words.   Naturally with such a talented guest, this Chapter dives deep into writing craft. How does a productivity writer focus on meaningful work? What does Oliver always have in his pocket on a walk to help him write? And what is his dream writing schedule?   But we also mine Oliver's brilliant mind in wide conversations that ask: What are the signs of living in a totalitarian state? What is Jungian analysis? Is promotion offensive? And why does Oliver wear earplugs even in silence?   Oliver Burkeman is my favorite self-help writer so it was a great pleasure that he joined me on 3 Books. Join me to learn how Oliver manages his writing projects, his 3 most formative books, the best question to ask before making big decisions, why mess is necessary, and much, much more.   Let’s flip the page to Chapter 142 now...

Let's jump into the backseat of Vishwas Aggrawal's Uber and take a trip you won't forget. This is a story about setting your own standards in a world constantly hammering us into "human resources." This is a story about setting your own winning lines in a world that wants us to be widgets. This is a story about raising the bar for yourself and deeply valuing the human connection and love that has the potential to exist between every single one of us. Uber has no formal leaderboard, reward mechanism, or pay-for-performance tied to driver rating.   So why would Vish care? Why would he care about giving thousands of rides and pouring in day after day of high-end customer services to establish an incredible 4.99 rating? Why would he clean his mats between every trip, only eat raw vegetables in his car to avoid odors, and develop masterful scripts that help riders feel deeply valued in the middle of their busy days? Why bother? Join me in the backseat of Vish's Uber as we slowly circle closer and closer to what we're really playing for in our short time on the planet.   We discuss the books that shaped Vish from his upbringing in India to his journey to give his daughter a better education on the other side of the world... even if it meant starting back at the beginning. Vishwas Aggrawal is one of the most engaging and inspiring people I've ever met. After you listen to his story in this classic 3 Books chapter, I hope you feel the same way.   Let's flip the page to Chapter 7 now...

James Daunt grew up in England the child of a diplomat—moving countries, tasting cultures, living a life with books and history at its core. He lived in Turkey and Cyprus before coming back to England for boarding school. After studying history at Cambridge, he didn’t know what he wanted to do, so the Career Services department pointed him towards investment banking across the sea in New York City. He actually liked the job but his girlfriend thought it was incredibly boring and encouraged him to quit. He thought, "How do I combine my love of reading and my love of travel into doing something wholly different?" The first Daunt Books independent bookstore opened on Marylebone High Street in London soon after. Unlike nearly every book store in the world he organized his books … by country. Not genre! But by place. Bookselling isn't an easy business! Lots of stores were going belly-up and profits were meager but over time he found a special knack for it. He went to bookselling school, paid fairly, and took mentorship and development seriously. When big bookstore chains started falling in the wake of Amazon, and Waterstones was essentially the only national chain left in the UK, a wealthy entrepreneur bought it and asked James to lead it. He turned the concept of a chain bookstore on its head, suggesting that stores would do better if the head office minimized itself and helped the booksellers operate like their own independent bookstores. Gone were planograms! Head office mandates! He tore up lucrative publisher deals spelling out which books to force onto the front tables to guarantee bestseller lists! He ripped up the rulebook completely. And what happened? Sales shot up. The chain survived ... then thrived. When the new owners of Waterstones bought Barnes & Noble—the largest bookstore chain in the world—they asked James to lead it, too. Today, James Daunt is the biggest bookseller on the planet overseeing nearly 1000 bookshops including his now-9 store Daunt Books indie chain, over 300 Waterstones, and over 600 Barnes & Nobles (including 65 new ones this year!!). I was very excited when James said "yes" to coming on 3 Books. We go deep on learning from history, the role of bookstores in society, his most formative books, the best place to find a date, the key to customer service, leading from behind, and much, much more....   Let’s flip the page to Chapter 141 now...

Did you grow up with Judy Blume?   My mom says I “found my voice” reading 'Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing' to my sister in the bathtub when I was a little kid. Well, I grabbed that tattered copy and carried it with me down to Key West, Florida where I had the extreme privilege of sitting down with the one and only Judy Blume.   Judy and I met on a hot and sweaty day in her Books & Books bookstore … where she works! I’m not joking. Step off your cruise ship and Judy Blume will ring up a copy of 'It Starts With Us' if you like. We grabbed a little circle table, set it up in front of the bestseller wall, and then talked about her most formative books.     In this classic 3 Books chapter, Judy and I discuss censorship, why sexy scenes should be kept in books, how to get kids to love reading, the role of bookstores in a community, and a surprise reveal on which book Judy says is the only one she has left to write...

“Happiness is a choice.”   Heard that saying before? Betting you have. We all have! It’s almost cliché. And yes, while research shows that a good deal of our happiness really is a choice, the saying gives us a “what” without a “how.”     And if your life is anything like mine, you have a million things going on—emaisl! texts! driving kids to soccer practice! finding time for date night!—and you need a "how" that can get you there fast, especially when your night time angst bubbles up, that dangerous mind that rears its ugly head after the dust of the day has settled and your resilience is low.      So in this special Fall Equinox Bookmark, I want to share this simple—dead simple, ruthlessly simple—system to help get you back on track. All you need is two minutes around the dinner table with your family or lying in bed to scroll back through your day. It's like wiping a wet shammy over the blackboard of your mind, and is backed up by science, too.     Ready to wind down your brain with intention? Let's flip the page...  

‘The Help’ by Kathryn Stockett. ‘Big Little Lies’ by Liane Moriarty. ‘Let's Pretend This Never Happened’ by Jenny Lawson. ‘American Dirt’ by Jeanine Cummins. ‘This Is How It Always Is’ by Laurie Frankel. ‘Listen for the Lie’ by Amy Tintera. ‘We Begin At the End’ by Chris Whittaker. ‘A Higher Loyalty’ by James Comey. ‘The Book of Awesome’ by Neil Pasricha.     What do these books have in common? The famed but invisible editor pulling the strings from behind the curtain: Amy Einhorn     Fifteen years ago my seven-month-old blog ‘1000 Awesome Things’ was nominated for ‘Best Blog’ from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. I was approached by literary agents and my new agent Erin Malone told me she wanted to auction my blog to publishers … next week. Suddenly I was in the foreign position of interviewing editors who were somehow clamoring to publish my book.     I signed with Amy Einhorn—a woman I’d never heard of, who had just started an eponymous imprint I’d never heard of, within Putnam Publishing, which I’d also never heard of. But I was immediately and magnetically attracted to her vision for the book. “It’s a hardcover, Neil,” she said. “It’s for moms. It’s a gift book. You gotta lose the frat boy posts. No blowing your nose in the shower. And I need a lot more new content.”     I learned everything about editing from Amy in our passionate late night diatribe emails, our hot-potato-ing of 300-page Word docs back and forth with 100s of comments in red down the sides, and arguing—good arguing!—about every single element along the way. I’d sit in her office and she’d have a variety of ‘cases’ laid out on her desk. “What do you think of 5” by 7”?” she’d say. “Too precious? Too cute?”     Amy is one of the most successful editors in the world today with the highest percentage of books edited hitting the New York Times bestseller list. According to a feature in The Observer, “New York editors and publishers speak of Amy Einhorn's success as the product of an almost mystical editorial instinct.” She has a knack for sniffing out voice, for knowing what will work and what won’t and, as you can imagine, I’ve been begging her to come on 3 Books for six years to hear how it all works.     So I flew down to NYC to talk with the bright, brilliant, and beaming Amy Einhorn about what an editor does, how a book gets published, what helps a book sell, Amy's 3 most formative books, and much, much more.     Let’s flip the page to Chapter 140 now…

Happy new moon, everybody! I am going to release a few of my favorite classic chapters of 3 Books. Let's start with Seth Godin! I flew down to New York to uncover and discuss the most formative books of the one and only Seth Godin (​@ThisIsSethsBlog​) from his Hastings-On-Hudson studio. Seth is the bestselling author of '​Linchpin​', '​Purple Cow​', '​Tribes​' and ​many more books​ and is known as one of the world's biggest thinkers in communities such as ​TED​ and the ​Marketing Hall of Fame​. And did I mention he writes one of ​the most popular blogs​ in the world? In this interview we discuss where Seth sees publishing going and his thoughts on the changes we're seeing in how people read and spend time. Seth shares his opinions on blurbs, acknowledgments, and his unique perspective on work-life balance. He also gives insights into how we can change our own world by changing the narrative inside our heads. I sat in Seth's studio transfixed, mesmerized, and hypnotized by one of the world's best brains. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Big thank you to the kind, generous, and indispensable ... Seth Godin.

I was at a coffee shop on College Street when the barista Tony yelled “Hey! There’s that duck!”     I turned and, sure enough, out the front window was a…  duck. A giant pixelated-looking green-headed Mallard set atop a rubber-tire-sized body on top of orange-stockinged legs and a pair of orange Converse. And he was just … walking by.     Like some kind of interdimensional tumbleweed.     Uh, what … was this?     Some gimmick from the local radio station? An ad campaign for a boot company? I ran outside with my friend Ateqah and was puzzled that … she seemed to know him!     “Hiiiiiii Lewis,” she cooed. “You’re looking great, Lewis! How’s your day going, Lewis?”     He just … quacked at her.     I had so many questions: “Who are you? What are you doing? What is the meaning of this?”     But, of course, he just … quacked.     Ducks can’t talk!     Then he turned and did a 1920s-pauper-finding-a-penny-style heel-click a good three feet in the air and I was left standing on the sidewalk, stunned, with a big smile on my face.     I couldn’t let the story finish there.     Turns out Ateqah had been following Lewis Mallard on Instagram for years so when she saw him she knew who he was. She took a picture of us and posted it on her Instagram Story, after which Lewis Mallard picked it up, artistically edited it, and posted it on his own.     I learned Lewis Mallard is an anonymous ‘interdimensional psychedelic folk artist’ responsible for street performances and art installations across Hamilton, Toronto and, most recently, Victoria. Little duck-painted streetcar stations are popping up and, of course, the duck, in full quacking character, is being spotted on the streets.     Lewis’s work has been covered in all the local press in Toronto—CP24, City News, CTV, The Toronto Star, etc. In one of many pieces of coverage in CBC a person named J.J. Collins, manager of a local record label, said "Anybody who sees Lewis will tell the next person they see and say, 'Oh my God, I saw Lewis on the way to work today.' It's like finding the golden ticket."     Finding the golden ticket? I … love that. BlogTo calls Lewis a “Toronto legend” and a “viral folk artist” and was trumpeting him after he painted a Toronto streetcar stop to look like … himself.     There was this … allure, to me, of what Lewis Mallard *was* and what he was doing. Taking over the streets, creating art amidst dustry construction, and mapping rivers of love, humanity, and community through endlessly flowing change we all feel happening on the streets.     Lewis Mallard agreed to meet me in human form—though his face, name, and identity remain secret throughout this interview—on a bright orange bench on College Street outside the same Manic Coffee where I saw him the first time. Lewis and I parked in the hot sun in front of noisy streetcars, gaggles of teens, and one guy who (really) believes Lewis is a spy.     We share Manic's famous yogurt cups, ham and cheese croissants, and cookies—all homemade!—and discuss sacrifices for art, the power of the collective, the right amount of ‘bad,’ community through poverty, how to parent your parents, becoming an adult reader, what vandalism *really* is, and, of course, Lewis Mallard’s 3 most formative books…     Let’s flip the page into Chapter 139 now…

Maria Popova was born in communist Bulgaria and emigrated to the U.S. six days after her 19th birthday back in 2003. She studied at the University of Pennsylvania after “being sold on the liberal arts promise of being taught how to live.”     Did it work?     Well, yes and no.     She spent her family’s life savings in the first few weeks on textbooks and, despite attending an American high school in Bulgaria, found herself in a bit of culture shock. “I mean, fitted sheets? Brunch?” She worked hard, a defining Popova characteristic, sometimes eating store brand canned tuna and oatmeal three times a day to get by. “I figured it was the most nutritious combo for the cheapest amount.”     At one of her jobs in 2006 a senior leader started sending out a Friday email of miscellany to provoke innovation and then Maria took the project on herself—weaving together write-ups on seemingly unrelated topics. One day was Danish pod homes, another the century-long evolution of the Pepsi logo, another on the design of a non-profit's new campaign to fight malaria. It was becoming clear: You never knew what you were going to get from Maria. And in an era of homogenization that was so ever-delightful.     Maria’s emails got popular and then she taught herself programming to put it all online on a site called BrainPickings.org.     I was blogging on 1000 Awesome Things every night in that internet paleolithic. I still remember so many times I’d be researching for some arcane bit of wisdom or trivia and Google would wisely fire me over to BrainPickings.org. I came to love the site which had a top-of-the-page tagline back then that read: “A scan of the mind-boggling, the revolutionary, and the idiosyncratic.”     And like my own blog’s 'About' page, this one didn’t reveal the author’s name, face, or identity. Was the internet just a bit more chat-room-anonymous back then? Or was this just before social media had been invented or figured out they needed our real names to maximize their ad revenues? Either way, Maria and I never got to know each other then … but, thankfully, a full 18 (!) years later the endlessly curious, cool, and erudite Maria Popova is ... still going.     George Saunders, our guest in Chapter 75, says Maria Popova manifests "abundant wit, intelligence, and compassion in all of her writings." Seth Godin, our guest in Chapter 3 says Maria "is indefatigable in her pursuits of knowledge and dignity. She does her work without ever dumbing down the work." And Krista Tippett, host of On Being, calls Maria a "cartographer of meaning in a digital age." Perhaps no surprise the Library of Congress has included her project, The Marginalian (once called Brain Pickings), in their permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials     I agree with the accolades and find Maria, her blog, and her wonderful books (‘Figuring,’ ‘The Snail With the Right Heart,’ 'The Universe in Verse,' and ‘A Velocity of Being’) truly exquisite and much-needed reflections of everything that makes life beautiful.     Like 3 Books, her site The Marginalian has remained free and ad-free over the years. Maria has no staff, no interns, no assistant, and The Marginalian is, in her words, “a thoroughly solitary labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood.”     The world can feel heavy, intense, and overwhelming—media, politics, and news pulls us away from those harder-to-measure things that make life wondrous. Love, connection, trust, kindness, passions, memories. The invisible but much-more-important guideposts that emerge as we look back on our lives from the end of it. That’s where Maria and The Marginalian rescue us—to point our attention towards the turn of phrase in a poem, a forgotten piece of advice from Ralph Waldo Emerson on trusting ourselves, or to provide a close reading with some stunning artwork from a 100-year-old picture book that helps illuminates one of those impossible-to-articulate emotions that we all share and feel…     I loved this conversation with the much-requested Maria Popova on a wonderfully wide-ranging set of topics including, of course, her 3 most formative books…

  I remember getting the knife.     It was near Christmas about 10 years ago and Leslie and I were zipping up a tiny suitcase before a beach trip with her grandparents and extended family. We weren’t married and I was making a desperate last-second plea to stuff a 576-page novel called ‘The Corrections’ by Jonathan Franzen into our bag. “It just won’t fit,” Leslie said. “You have … 100 pages left? Want to leave it and read it when we’re back?”     I did *not* want to do that.     The book was slipping under my skin—serrating my soul.     So I remember getting that knife.     The deep blasphemous pain I felt slicing the paperback spine and carving the last 100-ish pages off the book was far outweighed by the exquisite suite of pleasures I had slowly savoring it on the beach all week.     I had never read anything like ‘The Corrections’—with a clarity of character, wildly spinning plot, and unique three-dimensional *realness* that, page by page, twist by twist, left pits in my stomach, lumps in my throat, and tears in my eyes.     The book single-handedly elevated what I thought books could do.     I read ‘Freedom’ (2010), ‘Purity’ (2014), and 'Crossroads' (2021) the same way—equal parts admiration, fascination, and with a psychologically-transporting feeling of living outside of myself.     Jonathan Franzen is one of the most successful, accomplished, and decorated writers in the world. He is a Fulbright Scholar, National Book Award Winner, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, PEN/Faulkner Finalist, 2x Oprah’s Book Club Pick, voted to TIME’s ‘100 Most Influential’ list as well as gracing their cover as "Great American Novelist," and much, much more.     The NYT calls his books "masterpieces of American fiction," NYMag calls his books "works of total genius," and Chuck Klosterman writing in GQ says "Franzen is the most important fiction writer in America, and—if viewed from a distance—perhaps the only important one.”     Tall praise! But there is just nothing like a Jonathan Franzen novel and it was sheer delight going deep with the master of the deep to discuss writing advice, the magic of the written word, what heroes look like today, competing with David Foster Wallace, the best thing we can do for the climate, Jon’s 3 most formative books, and much, much more…     Let’s turn the page to Chapter 137 now…