All right, let's do a final segment here. I wanna talk about the books I read in April. All right, Jesse, here's the bad news. I lost my list. I don't know what happened to it. - You were talking about this before the show and I think you should explain how you finished the book so early.

- Yeah, so you might be thinking, well, wait a second, can't you just remember all the books you read in April? That was just last month. But here's the thing, I count books by the month I finished them and I'm on a weird rotation. I'm sort of out of sync.

So I tend to finish the books for a month. I start them before the month begins and tend to finish them about halfway through the month. So I'm already, for example, a book and a half into my June books, even though it's May, whatever. So when I'm trying to remember my April books, a lot of these are books I started reading or maybe started reading, what, back in March.

So this is just the weirdness of how I've sort of shifted off schedule. So I just walked around my library today and looked at books and, okay, that one I remember, that one I remember. So I was able, Jesse, to reconstruct four out of the five books I read in April.

I can't remember the fifth. - You had a remarkable notebook. - Right now, I would just be hitting the buttons, right? The sun would come in through the window. I'd be fashionably dressed with a macchiato and I would see the books. And then they're always, always in these videos, they always have like a business chart that they're labeling.

In fact, here, switch over to the screen for a second. Here's the Kindle Scribe ad. Look at what's in the picture. Am I right? It's a chart that they're labeling. That's what always happens in these ads. They're always like, what? And they put like an exclamation point and they're drawing on a chart.

That's what business people do, is they label charts. But anyway, yes, my remarkable Scribe would be able to find this. All right, but I did remember four of them. See, it helped because I went on a vacation during that period. So it was easy for me to remember what books I brought on the vacation.

So that helped me here. All right, so I read the book, "The Real Work" by Adam Gopnik. Gopnik is a long time staff writer for "The New Yorker." He's known for art criticism. So this was his first, the book takes a tentative step towards the pragmatic nonfiction world. So this book is about what really goes into mastery.

Gopnik's a great writer. You'll see that as you read the book. And basically he builds reflections about mastery around different, I guess you could think of him as masters he spends time with or different activities he pursues. I was reading this actually in Las Vegas and I went to see David Copperfield.

And so I appreciated that there's a whole section in this book where he's working with professional magicians. And this is where "The Real Work," that term comes from, is the world of professional magicians. So anyways, he's a great writer. This is not a Gladwell book. So it's not gonna, let's break down mastery into the contrarian understanding that you can then apply to your life.

It's more reflective and philosophical than that, but it's very well-written, I enjoyed it. Also read John McPhee's "Levels of the Game." It's his book about tennis, Arthur Ashe versus Grabener. Brilliant example, it's sort of studied in nonfiction courses, just a brilliant example of what McPhee is known for, which is using sophisticated structure to try to generate insight.

And so the structure of "Levels of the Game," this book is from the '60s. This has been replicated a lot now, but I think McPhee was at the cornerstone of this, is it's built around a single US Open tennis match between Arthur Ashe and David Grabener. And it moves seamlessly without even section breaks between they'll be playing this point and then it's a backstory, and then back to the point.

And so it goes back and forth between these two tennis players' backstories and the game that's going on in a sort of complicated structure where he won't even break, it'll be a return. And then next paragraph is Arthur Ashe, 15 years earlier. And he goes back and forth, back and forth.

And the idea is as you learn more and more about the backstory of these players, the nuances of their play, which you're also learning more and more about as you hear about the match, become more clear that he's drawing this connection between their style of play and all these different things that went into their history and who they are as a person and what's going on in the culture around them.

It's just a masterwork in narrative nonfiction. And one of the things that caught my attention, 'cause I read that and I read Gottlieb's book at the same time, two New Yorker writers, obviously different generations, is that McPhee, I don't know who's doing this right now, but I'm inspired by this.

McPhee uses simple language, complicated structure to get the truth. And I would say that's probably, not a lot of people are doing that now. I would say the tone of the New Yorker right now, including my writing for better, for worse, also relies on lyricism to try to get at truth more evocative sentences that have some sort of poetry in the writing, that the writing and the rhythms, there's a lot of rhythm of writing work, I think is going on a lot now at the New Yorker, that it's almost lyrical nonfiction prose that can extract insights and understanding.

And Gopnik's great at that, he's a very philosophical, self-reflective writer. McPhee was so different. I mean, his sentences are simple. (imitates music) They read like they come out of one of those mid-century grammar guides, strunken whatever. - Or they might read like you speak, like people speak probably, right?

- Well, what I meant by the grammar guides, and I'm forgetting the classic strunken-- - Strunken white. - Is it strunken white? Yeah, so in the sense of sometimes it's very formal grammar, it's like, oh, this is just perfectly constructed grammar, is what I mean by it. Yeah, it's like this comma, this semicolon, this, but it's using grammar like you would see in strunken white, like, oh, this is a well-constructed sentence, not like in maybe in like something I might write or a modern New Yorker piece, you use grammar to help support something that's more poetic or lyrical or whatever.

The sentences are just boom, boom, boom, boom, subordinate clause, boom, just very straightforward. And yet when combined with complicated structure is incredibly deep. So I don't know, not a lot of people are doing that now. Maybe a lot of, not a lot of people are doing that back then either, but I just as a writing masterclass exercise, reading 60s era McPhee, it just got me thinking a lot about how I write, about how he wrote, about his effect, made me think about my own writing a little bit.

So it was cool. That's how you form my book group. I'm in a book group that just reads sports books. - Yeah. - Yeah, so that was my turn to pick. And so of course I was gonna pick like. - Was there a lot of tennis strategy in there?

- Yeah, you should read it. I'll loan you my copy. - I should. - Yeah, because you play a lot of tennis these days. - I play at least three times a week. - Yeah. - It's a complicated game, it's like golf. - Oh my God. The sense I got, yeah, it's like golf.

That's the sense I got is you gotta be playing since you were five. - Not necessarily, but you need to play a lot. - You have to play a lot of maintenance. Like if you wanna be any good, you gotta put a lot of time in it. - So one of the things maybe you would understand this is because you're playing tennis now, I didn't understand it as much.

So one of the big parts of Ash's game is that when he was being trained coming up as a kid, they wanted him, they almost exclusively was training his backhand. They wanted the backhand to feel as comfortable to him as a forehand, right? So it was just like, I'm very, very comfortable with it.

- Yeah, 'cause a lot of times people just expose your backhand if it's weak. - Yeah, so he's just very comfortable with his backhand. And then he was a very innovative, creative player, right? So he was very much risky, exciting shots, cross court drop shots, the winners, that type of thing.

Whereas Grabener was much more of a mechanical, play the odds. There's a lot of statistics in it. It was very interesting. - Actually in air, there was a cool little commercial with Ash. Remember that in the beginning of the movie? - Yep, with the racket. Yep, the wooden racket.

Yep, they get into that because Grabener used to, moved on to metal racket. So I think you would like it. The thing, the tennis players in my book group were saying, they were surprised by how fast Ash was serving. It really is not that far from today's era of monster serves and it was within, I mean, he was serving like 130 or something like that.

- Wow. - Or 125, or like he was close with a wooden racket. So, you know, it's like now it's supposed to be the age of the monster serve, but you read this match, like they would wanna get, if you could get four aces in a row, you're like, that's kind of what I'm looking for, is like in a lot of these sets, it's gonna be all aces for the serve side.

It's all about making use of the few mistakes that happen. - Mm-hmm, it's interesting. - All right, other book I read, "The Transcendent Brain" by Alan Lightman. I like Alan Lightman a lot, former physicist at MIT that went on to start their science writing master degree program. I like him in part, as I've mentioned on the show, because their family has a cabin on this Island up in Maine and they go up there and spend the entire summer.

I think it has electricity, maybe. There's no phone, there's no internet. And I always just, you know, I sort of knew, I didn't know him well. My wife had crossed paths with him a few times when we lived in Boston and he was at MIT, I was at MIT.

And, you know, we had friends in common. I always loved that about him. But anyways, he now just writes these short provocative books for Pantheon, which is cool, which I appreciate. And this one was trying to give a materialist explanation for spirituality, trying to say you can appreciate and even organize your life around spiritual experiences while still maintaining a scientific materialist view.

So he sort of gives a Darwinian explanation for why maybe we feel these senses of connection or moments of transcendent awe and trying to explain that materialistically. Typical Alan Lightman book, it's short and it dives into these interesting angles, different history of religion and brain science over here and doesn't write more than he needs to write.

So I always enjoy a good Alan Lightman book. The final book I remember reading in April is called "Finding the Mother Tree" by Suzanne Simard, who is a, I don't know what the field is, forestry maybe? Who studied, she did a lot of the innovative work that discovered trees are connected to each other underground through networks of fungus.

They can not only communicate with each other with these underlying fungus networks, they can actually move resources on it. Sugars, for example, from one tree to another. And you even have in forest, you'll find what she called the mother tree, this very old tree that was connected to a lot of younger trees and it helps to redistribute resources to them, et cetera.

Anyway, she did a lot of work on that. And so this book is about that. There's been a couple of books in the last 10 years about trees and communicating. This one is interesting because it's memoir. It's memoir/science. So she's actually a very good memoir writer. She had a very interesting upbringing in Canada.

She comes from one generation removed from a Canadian lumbering family and worked actually in the timber industry before she moved over to academia. It's actually a pretty astutely drawn self-portrait that's intertwined with her scientific discovery. So you learn about her discoveries as they occur in her life as she tells a story of her life.

And I thought it was a surprisingly well-written book. And the science is interesting too. Now, there's a bit of a grain of salt that has to be taken with it. I mean, there's a, I don't know, a sort of like philosophical or political resonance to this idea that clearly has to be involved in the popularity and the push of these ideas.

It's like, no, trees don't compete. They share resources together. They help each other and cooperate. They mother each other. I mean, there's very much like embedded in these scientific studies, also reflections of critiques of aspects of capitalist culture. And so it's a complicated field, but she found some really cool things, but the book was really well-written and she has a really, had a really interesting life.

So I grabbed it randomly. This was a politics and prose table, boom. Let me just grab it. It's not a new book. Sometimes when you're traveling, you have to just serendipitously grab something. And I'm glad I grabbed that one. All right, so that's four books. There was a fifth.

I just can't remember what it is. I should just make one up, Jesse. What would be the most impressive thing I could have read? - All right, you guys. - I was reading "Gravity's Rainbow" or "War and Peace." Let's just make up what it is. I don't know. But there was a fifth in there, but those are the four I can remember.

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