3 Books With Neil Pasricha

A few years ago, I settled into the children's section of Book City in the heart of Toronto's beautiful Bloor West Village for the first chapter of  3 Books  recorded live in an open bookstore with my favorite bookseller in the world—the one and only Sarah Ramsey.   I love Sarah because she takes the art of bookselling seriously and seemingly reads people's minds to find the exact book they need t...

Born in 1934, the 18th of 19 children in the small blue-collar town of Shawinigan Falls, Quebec, Jean Chrétien has risen to become the "grandfather of Canada" and a definitive force in global politics for over 50 years.   Chrétien was one of the longest-serving Prime Ministers in Canadian history and led three successive majority terms as leader of the Liberal Party from 1993 to 2003.   He famousl...

Long before I oriented my life around reading, I would get the majority of my (4-5!) books per year read during the summer. But summer reads get a bad rap for being too silly, too saucy, too simple. So this summer join me in bridging the gap to find great beachy reads. We want books that have a speedy pace *and* expand our minds! We want books that help us escape our everyday lives *and* teach us...

BIG NEWS! I just finished writing CANADA IS AWESOME: A Little Book About A Big Country. This podcast is me reading the whole book! The book is about all the weird, wonderful, beautiful things that make Canada ... Canada. Did you ever notice Canadians speak in the collective? "What do you think of the weather we're having?" "Shall we grab a Tims before the meeting?" "Think we have a shot at the pla...

It started with a modern plea for help: "Can I charge my dead phone in your bookstore?" I was in Del Mar, California, walking up the coast of the Pacific Ocean after birding all morning in ​ Torrey Pines ​ . I was tracking my birds on ​ eBird ​ —the ​ Peregrine Falcons ​ , ​ Anna's Hummingbirds ​ , and ​ California Scrub-Jays ​ —and, of course, completely drained my phone's battery. When I get to...

Loneliness rates have doubled since the 1980s and Vivek Murthy, former US Surgeon General, says loneliness will be the next major epidemic. So if loneliness is being alone and sad … then what's being alone and happy? Solitude. A few years ago, I picked up an incredible book called ' ​ Solitude ​ ' by Michael Harris, bestselling author and winner of the Governor General's Award for his writing. It...

Ginny Yurich ( ​ @1000hoursoutside ​ ) drove 5 hours up the road from Michigan to Toronto to hang out with Leslie and me. We went for a walk outside (of course!) and recorded this podcast—our second outdoors podcast in a row after ​ Nickisha The Dog Walker ​ ! Why outside? I'm glad you asked! Ginny Yurich is the homeschooling mother of 5 (!) who has spirited a movement called ​ 1000 Hours Outside...

Have you heard of a book called ' ​ The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck ​ '? I'm guessing you have since it's sold, uh, 16 million copies since it came out in 2016. There hadn't been a non-fiction book that big and disruptive in a long, long time… Mark's meteoric success is the product of a giant mind which has mastered the art of taking the biggest, densest books on the planet and then simmering...

Let's go for a walk!   I've sometimes imagined 3 Books as a long walk with a friend. So today—let's take one! Nickisha moved to Toronto from Jamaica when she was 16 to reunite with her mom and after working as a travel agent she broke out on her own to run a successful business full of fresh air, exercise, community, and lots of love.   I sometimes see Nickisha with five, six, or seven dogs around...

No one does it like Angie. Racial tensions, police shootings, citizen uprisings. Does this sound like the setting of a YA novel? How about three of them? Her debut ' ​ The Hate U Give, ​ ' her sophomore release ' ​ On The Come Up ​ ,' and her third ' ​ Concrete Rose ​ ' were all on The New York Times bestseller list, and her fantasy middle school-level book ' ​ Nic Blake and the Remarkables: The M...

Is porn good sex education? Why does body autonomy matter for kids? Does talking about sex kill the mood? Emily Nagoski has the answers! Emily is a sex educator and activist whose mission is to teach us how to live with confidence and joy inside our bodies. She does this as the New York Times bestselling author of 'Come As You Are,' 'Burnout,' and 'Come Together,' as well as through her 3 popular...

What do you know about James Frey? Or what do you think you know about James Frey? I'm guessing it's not nothing. Everyone has an opinion! When I first spotted ' ​ A Million Little Pieces ​ ' on my wife's bookshelf when we were moving in together I was like "Oh? Really? That book? The Oprah guy?" And she was like "Have you read it?" And I was like "No, no idea what it's even about. Just that it's...

Don't use mouthwash.   Why?   It's not Lindy.   At least that's what Paul Skallas, a Chicago-born technology lawyer who goes by Lindyman online, says. I was fascinated to read a New York Times profile of him titled "The Lindy Way of Living," and knew I wanted to have him on 3 Books .   In the 2012 book 'Antifragile,' the statistician and scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined "the Lindy Effect." He...

We live in interesting times.    And they're getting interestinger!   I keep my eyes open for big thinkers to help guide and inform me as I keep trying to make sense of the world. My friend Tim Urban  (@waitbutwhy) is one of those people:   Tim has a giant mind willing to engage with our fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. The big questions!   Tim's blog  Wait Buy Why  still s...

​ Nick Sweetman ​ is one of Toronto's most prominent graffiti artists. Last February I was walking down Lansdowne Avenue in Toronto with my friend ​ Michael Bungay Stanier ​ , who was our guest back in ​ Chapter 48 ​ , and as we strolled under a giant bridge I saw a giant ... well, it looked like a photo! But it wasn't a photo. It was a massive spray-painted image of a ​ Hooded Merganser ​ , and a...

Who else loves David Sedaris? I discovered him in 1997 when an old mentor/editor at Golden Words , my college humor papers, suggested I pick up his book 'Naked' to become a better writer myself. I found the essays sardonic, witty, uncannily observational, and laugh-out-loud funny. I couldn't believe how gently and elegantly he wrote about topics ranging from his obsessive compulsive tics to droppi...

Happy Solstice!   As we do every December solstice it's time for our 7th Annual "Best Of" episode of 3 Books .   3 Books is our 22-year-long conversation to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world.   This year we sat with ​academics at Oxford​ to ​bus drivers in St. Louis​ , with ​Jonathan Franzen​ in Santa Cruz to ​Oliver Burkeman​ in the North York Moors, with the ​world's...

Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world with over a million employees in the U.S. alone. A monolith responsible for trillions of dollars of revenue through retail, entertainment, and infrastructure.   But Chris Smalls took it on anyway.   Chris had worked at Amazon for 5 years before he was fired in March 2020 after leading a walkout at Amazon's Staten Island warehouse to protest pande...

Once you find purpose, and once you find style… what's left? Beauty. What's left is finding and putting out beauty into the world.   There are not many writers who have genuinely figured this out … but one of them is Mitch Albom. Mitch is the author of ' ​ Tuesdays with Morrie ​ ,' the bestselling memoir of all time, as well as ' ​ The Five People You Meet in Heaven ​ ' and his latest bestseller '...

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 w...

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...

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...

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...

"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 ne...

'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?...