Should I give my buddies books?

a question unique to the #LitBro

First of all, I wrote about the Super Bowl this week for The Daily Beast. Read it here.

Everybody has a few groups of friends. You have work-friends, and friend-friends and maybe you have gym-friends or drinking-friends or ultimate frisbee-friends or whatever. This, I believe, is healthy. It’s good to have a lot of friends.

I have some friends with whom I talk about books — my friend Cathy, who I mention sometimes on this blog. And my friend Hannah (who has a running Substack here). But my friend-friends, the core group of men I’ve known and been close to for the past decade-and-a-half, don’t read. We don’t talk about books. We talk about sports and music and girls and all the same things we’ve talked about for the last decade. We have families now, so we talk about that too.

This week, we’re all in Mexico because our buddy Ryan is getting married — this is our fourth (or maybe fifth?) wedding with this group. And there are another two more weddings on the way. I went out to the pool yesterday with a book — a well-thumbed Eve Babitz collection — and there were a few light-handed remarks, nothing cruel, just things like dude, did you really bring a book?

Not that they were surprised. They know I read a lot of books, that I’m a book-a-week kind of guy. But it still strikes them as odd when they see me carrying a book around.

Now, these guys aren’t averse to reading. They just don’t read. And I feel kind of bad about that, sometimes (more and more frequently as of late), I wonder if I should try to give them books. I’m not suggesting throwing a Thomas Mann tome at their heads, just offering them something accessible. A gateway drug, if you will.

Here’s precisely what I’m suggesting, I’ve always been a reader. My college roommate was not a reader. But I guess I once made an off-hand remark like dude, you sound like an idiot, you should read a book occasionally. I didn’t think about it until he asked for a book. So I gave him a copy of Into Thin Air, which is an easy book to read if you’re a guy who doesn’t read.

And he couldn’t stop talking about it, about how crazy the ‘96 Everest disaster was. After that, I gave him a book called Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell — a great nonfiction about surfing on the North Shore. A few more like that — something by Hemingway and something by Grisham and David Grann — and I had him hooked. He still reads today. We talk occasionally, about our families and work and believe it or not, about books.

Here’s another thing: it’s awesome to be able to recommend books. I think it’s one of the most meaningful things you can do. To say to somebody, I know you well enough to know what you’ll like to read. I’ve got a shelf of books that people have given me and almost all of them are wonderful. My favorite things.

I thought about this when my best friend was deployed a few months ago. We’d talk every day and he’d complain about how boring it was in Bahrain. I was going to make a care package for him and send over a dozen cans of Zyn and a cheap VR headset and, for the first time ever, I was going to give him a book. I was thinking Catch-22, which would have worked perfectly because A.) it’s about a military pilot and he’s a military pilot and B.) it’s hilarious. He ended up stateside before the care package ever came together.

I begin to wonder why I never have thrown any books at them. I guess it’s just never come up. But we’re getting older, we don’t spend all night at the bars anymore. And it seems to me that the time is soon approaching when I can get them hooked on my little secret. Books. A good book can make a hard day a little easier and put the whole world in perspective. Breakfast at Tiffany's can do that for me. And Tortilla Flat and parts of War & Peace and The Sun Also Rises and even Play it As It Lays.

The biggest problem with this plan of mine is that I don’t want to come off as pushy. I don’t actually want to say dude, you sound like an idiot, you should read a book occasionally. Because they’re not idiots, they’re all smart guys and they’re my best friends. I just think the world would be a little brighter for everybody if we all had a book in our hand at the pool from time to time.