Books to Make You Throw Your Phone into the River (The Actual, Original List)

Alt title: books to make you want to Thoreau your phone in a river.

One of my most fundamental values is a need for nature and beauty—to the extent that I realized my blog is largely centered around the sensation of awe—which defines my routines, where I live, and has contributed to the friction I sense in needing to care about social media to fund my creative work and career goals but never quite being able to commit because I hate what leaning in does to my screen time. I like awe as a framework for a good number of reasons (and also love this definition from Aeon, a publication I worship):

On my ‘books I’ve read lately that make me want to hurl my phone into a river’ note

Anyway, the first note I’ve had go even remotely beyond me on Substack is a little graphic carousel I posted from a bunch of my recent reads related to real-life experience, nature, and other fascinations that affect my frustration with the online ecosystem. This thread’s loosely related to my reading list on embodiment, movement, and being grounded in the senses, but I’ll go down that rabbit hole another time.

If you’d like the full list of picks, you can scroll down to the bottom of this post, but I hope you’ll be curious about what’s influenced my construction of this particular collection.

I think it’s hilarious that digital minimalism content is what’s gone semi-viral—in the tiny context of my platform at least—because by being on here at all, we’re not practicing what we preach. And yet that’s a lot of what’s romanticized on Substack: handwritten letters, slow living, annotations, older classic writers.

This is a bit of an aside, and I genuinely do love that we’re calling back to meaningful attention, but I’m a bit cynical when I suspect a specific flavor of engagement-farming that seems to contradict its whole message. It’s not people sharing quotes by classic writers that gets me, or mood images of cottage country and getting offline, but rather a specific format of “[Classic writer]…wow” on a loop that is obviously dragged-and-dropped into a scheduler because the algorithm lOoOoOves Fyodor Dostoyevsky or a “my essays are for the girls who just would rather have a rainy afternoon curled up with a book with their phone off.” Which again, no hate, but the pervasiveness hints at an formula undermining the sentiment itself rather than simple unoriginality.

See also: so-called relatable posts that are fully plagiarized by viral tweets from ten years ago.¹ As Anne Lamott said in the lovely Bird by Bird,

I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?

Which circles back to awe anyway. You have to play the game, so I get it, but you see the irony of popping off online by mourning what we’re losing by doing so, and my response to that dissonance depends on my interpretation of whether or not I believe the poster is grappling with that friction themselves or just hunting for clicks.² Like, yes, I’m hypocritical for posting about this too, but I think it resonated because people also feel that urge and tension for things to be different. I’ve also been on a big medium changes the message kick this year inspired by Superbloom by Nicholas Carr. In fairness, I’ve also been rewatching Black Mirror. I do assume most people are hopefully genuine about what they express re: slowness, nature, looking for what’s meaningful.

But I digress. I might be naïvely wanting this ecosystem to be more than it is, which has definitely inspired me to read about what I miss, love, and want.

Which leads me to the actual list of nature + digital minimalism books I wrote about six months ago

I prefer my good ol’ fashioned book blog to this still (and I don’t think Substack counts as blogging) because it does allow me to opt out of many of the negatives, weightiness, and exhaustion we do feel when we’re on these actual social media platforms and spurred towards reach and audience appeal.

Which leads me to: Books to Hurl Your Phone into the River, a post I wrote 6+ months ago. The note that took off is actually a compilation of the most recent additions to that list—a thread I’ve followed all year as I’ve longed for the great outdoors, an exemption from the rat race, and an understanding of shortcuts to meaning. That list includes:

On the Pain of Being Visible

How to Disappear by Akiko Busch

In my modern career, self-promo is necessary to survive as an author and journalist. Rates are dropping, breakouts are rarer, etc. You never get a sure bet, but building a platform is one of the only ways you can claw your way closer to some semblance of certainty. So I’ll do it, because I want this. And all the science basically says the way creators grow online is by cultivating a parasocial relationship—which is inherently a misunderstood or flattened one. You’re never going to convey all your nuances in a medium as imperfect as words on the Internet, and I value my privacy and sense of authenticity too much to ever fully find that idea comfortable.

I read this book in 2019 when I did disappear online, and I spent the summer becoming an entirely different self. I do think I have an especially sharp relationship to collective identity, and camouflage as expressed in this book that others do not have—because I’m an identical twin who grew up being treated interchangeably with my sister. (How to Be Multiple by Helena de Bres is a thought-provoking study of this.)

This book is slim and flowery, weaving in nature meditations with modern bits like facial recognition that examine how we’ve constructed our ideas of presence and visibility. Some may find it woo-woo, but I found it lovely.

If Your Screentime Notification Makes You Feel Sick to Your Stomach

Irresistible by Adam Alter

I got the stat wrong on my graphic; it’s 11 years (and the number has likely climbed higher, as we get more and more online.) I like Adam Alter a lot because his work is insightful and fascinating, but always compassionate. It doesn’t overinflate ideas of individual control; as he points out, our environment and addiction cues are manipulating us, and willpower only goes so far. (I love his work in unconscious influences, even though critiques say the science is flimsy; still, it keeps me humble in a way.)

The horror of this particular stat sticks in my brain and makes me want to drop off the phonescape. There are small fixes you can make to help—like charging your phone in another room at night (you’ve probably heard this one), using dedicated devices for specific tasks, and even changing your phone display to grayscale.

On the Dopamine Machine!!! Wanting But Never Having

The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman M.D. and Michael E. Long

Of course, our addiction systems get screwed by phones and the Internet. There’s a conversation within psychiatry and psychology about whether or not behavioral addictions can actually be classified as addictions (see: The Urge by Carl Erik Fisher), which is why neurotransmitters can be so fascinating.

The Molecule of More was one of my favorite books of last year, and it talks a lot about what becomes compelling to you and how that’s ultimately not as satisfying as the grounded joy of our here-and-now processing systems (which tend to be sparked by nature, awe, depth of conversation, etc,. All the stuff that “really matters.”)

I recommended this book to a blog reader who works in the psychiatry program at the University of Buffalo and she invited Dr. Lieberman to speak at their Grand Rounds; I was invited, and attended the Zoom lecture at 2 A.M. because of my time zone. It was so worth it.

Other Books I Included in My List

The Full List, Combined + Linked

There are even more that I can include, but I’ll leave it here for now so as not to overwhelm. This is a huge theme in my reading.

• Irresistible by Adam Alter

• How to Disappear by Akiko Busch

• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

• The Solace of Open Spaces: Essays by Gretel Ehrlich

• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

• The Explorer’s Gene by Alex Hutchinson

• Awe by Dachner Keltner

• The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin, Ph.D

• The Molecule of More by Daniel E. Lieberman and Michael E. Long

• Upstream by Mary Oliver

• The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen

• Walden by Henry David Thoreau

• The Nature Fix by Florence Williams

MORE TRAVEL + EXPLORER NARRATIVES (feels like a different list so I’m splitting)

• After the North Pole by Erling Kagge

• Silence: In the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge

• The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

• The End of the Earth by Peter Matthiessen

• Travels in Alaska by John Muir

As noted, I’ve been running my book review blog since 2011 (as I started it at age 13) so I have hundreds and hundreds of book reviews + lists to transfer over from the archive. There are actually full reviews of some of these on my blog, and I’ll transfer those to Substack too.

In the name of stability—i.e. hopefully getting the growth and eventual funding I need to spend more time doing what I love—I’m throwing up my hands and starting to post my archive on Substack. So the volume of posts you’ll see will be high, but it reflects over a decade’s worth of work and passion.³

Thank you to everyone who’s recently started to follow or engage with my account and Words Like Silver as a whole; this does feel like “old social media” in the sense that I’m just absolutely relishing every conversation I’m able to have about any of these reads, the recs y’all have, or that undercurrent friction so many understand.

Now get off your phone.

From a week spent thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. (A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson is also a gem.)

1. I never understood this plagiarism anyway—because if you’re recycling viral posts that aren’t yours…even if they get 10k likes and you go up by +1k subscribers, where’s the satisfaction in actually having a platform? Why do you care? Which leans more into the “actually, Substack is just as subject to the flaws and plagiarism and influencer thirst of any other platform for the bad actors and the desperate (which is not all), but they can hide it behind the guise of ‘being a writer <3’” I know the end answer is for the money or attention and “the right reasons” can be such a sticky phrase for many reasons, but I notice those negatives frequently enough to feel demoralized by the reward systems.

2. I’d like to think you can tell what’s genuine and not—and even then, I fully understand most everyone’s in the same boat of trying to “make it,” so I equally hate sentiments on the opposite side of the pendulum that imply Substack should be a space free from any and all ambition in regards to numbers.

3. By that, I’m trying to avoid the assumption that the quantity of my posts means I’ve written 20 in a week and not given any thought to them. They’re not burn-and-churn articles cranked out to please the feed. This is my life’s work written and curated over 14.5 years, just updated and reshared.