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About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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Dan Pink’s book Drive was good, so I also picked up this book from the library, subtitled “The last career guide you’ll ever need”. It’s written in the style of manga (Japanese comics), and can be read in half an hour, but offers solid advice on career management.
Here are the bullet points it hits:
I thought it was a cute idea that took some standard career advice mantras and made them seem fresh by presenting them in the new form of a graphic novel. Not a ton of depth, but I enjoyed the quick read.
I’ve liked Colson Whitehead’s previous work, including The Intuitionist (the title convinced me to pick up the book), and John Henry Days. His writing is just wonderfully sumptuous, so rich that I often have to re-read bits to appreciate the language.
A few years ago, he published this book, a set of essays reflecting on his home of New York City. Now that I’ve been here close to a year (!), it was interesting to read it and see how his impressions match my own experiences.
It’s great stuff. He’s got chapters on many common experiences at New York, from arriving on the bus at Port Authority, wandering down Broadway or through Central Park or Times Square, visiting Coney Island, or even the quotidian experiences of morning, rush hour, or rain.
On the very first page, he described when you are a New Yorker, and I’ve shared this observation with several people here, and they all go “Wow, that’s exactly right!” Here it is:
“No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet cafe plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.”
While I love so many of his observations throughout the book, I picked one almost at random to share as an example of what the book feels like. Check out his description of waiting for the subway:
“Look down the tunnel one more time and your behavior will describe a psychiatric disorder. It’s infectious. They take turns looking down into darkness and the platform is a clock: the more people standing dumb, the more time has passed since the last train. The people fall from above into hourglass dunes. Collect like seconds.
There’s a culture for platforms and a culture for between stations. On the platform there are strategies of where seats will appear when the doors open, of where you want to be when you get off, of how to outmaneuver these impromptu nemeses. So many variables, everyone’s a mathematician with an advanced degree. Wait. Those elephantine ears of hers. Does she know something he doesn’t, she’s moving closer to the edge, and then he hears the roar, too. The herd trembles, the lion approaches, instincts awaken. The jaws slide apart and the people step inside. Various sounds of gorging.”
A couple weeks ago I broke down and actually did some non-class, non-Economist reading. Crazy, eh? It was a weekend where I didn’t feel up to socializing, but didn’t feel up to homework either. So I looked for something light in my book pile, and this is what I read.
Bobos in Paradise, by David Brooks
I’d meant to read this book for a while, but never got around to it. I saw it in the Strand for $5, so I picked it up. It’s the “comic sociology” of the rise of bourgeois bohemians. For decades, the two cultural forces of bourgeois and bohemians had been battling, culminating in the culture wars of the sixties. But as we entered the nineties, the two cultural forces had merged. “WASPy upscale suburbs were suddenly dotted with arty coffeehouses where people drank little European coffees and listened to alternative music. Meanwhile, the bohemian downtown neighborhoods were packed with multimillion-dollar lofts and those upscale gardening stores where you can buy a faux-authentic trowel for $35.99.”
Brooks takes a look at the two cultures throughout history (or at least since the Industrial Revolution, which really defined them) and how we’ve gotten to this point, with chapters discussing the ways in which the mix of cultures has permeated all aspects of society, including:
I don’t feel like the book had much in the way of deep insight, but it was a pleasant quick tour of a culture of which I’m probably a member.
Sperm Are from Men, Eggs Are from Women: The Real Reason Men And Women Are Different, by Joe Quirk
Joe Quirk wrote a novel called The Ultimate Rush a few years ago. I’m not sure how I found it, but I really enjoyed it. It’s basically Snow Crash set in modern-day San Francisco, but it’s loads of fun. I actually ran into him at a Future Salon at one point, and asked him what his next book was going to be. And he said it was going to be a non-fiction book on evolutionary biology. And I was like, um?
But here it is. I’ve had my eye out for it for a while, but picked it up in the half-off section at The Strand. Another quick, fun read. Quirk is not a scientist, just an interested amateur, but he takes the ideas of evolutionary biology and relates them back to common questions of sexuality in chapters such as “Female Promiscuity Controls the Size of Your Testicles”, “Male Promiscuity Decides Your Height”, “Why Women Are Coy, Men Clueless”, “Why Your Clitoris Is Hard To Find”, etc. It’s pretty entertaining for him to relate the penis to a peacock tail. I’d heard many of these ideas in bits and pieces, but Quirk’s a good writer, and it’s fun to have them all in one place. It does make for a depressing read in places, as he draws (sometimes tenuous) connections between a lot of really stupid sexual behaviors and evolutionary biology. I’d recommend it as a quick read from the library if you want to become even more cynical about dating.
I first heard of Chuck Klosterman when the ESPN Sports Guy did an interview with him (here’s part 2). Described as a pop culture guru, the interview made it clear that he spent way way too much time thinking about inconsequential things. And I mean that in a good way. So he was on my mental list of authors to check out when I got a chance.
I happened to be wandering through a bookstore one day, and saw Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, noticed it was by Klosterman, and picked it up. It’s a book of essays on a variety of topics, including Saved by the Bell, porn, Tom Cruise, the Real World TV show and a Guns’n'Roses cover band. Oh, and a meditation on Star Wars, that I flipped to in the bookstore. I read the following paragraph:
…it’s clear that Luke Skywalker was the original Gen Xer. For one thing, he was incessantly whiny. For another, he was exhaustively educated – via Yoda – about things that had little practical value (i.e. how to stand on one’s head while lifting a rock telekinetically). Essentially, Luke went to the University of Dagobah with a major in Buddhist philosophy and a minor in physical education. There’s not a lot of career opportunities for that kind of schooling; that’s probably why he dropped out in the middle of the semester. Meanwhile, Luke’s only romantic aspirations are directed toward a woman who (literally) looks at him like a brother. His dad is on his case to join the family business. Most significantly, all the problems in his life can be directly blamed on the generation that came before him, and specifically on his father’s views about what to believe (i.e. respect authority, dress conservatively, annihilate innocent planets, etc.)
I read that, and bought the book. Anybody that could extract that amount of analysis out of Star Wars and phrase it so hilariously was somebody I wanted to read more of. The rest of the essays are of similar excellent quality. Highly recommended. It’s great bedside reading.
I later picked up Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, his next book. This was a travelogue, as he took a cross-country road trip to visit the places where rock stars have died. It sounds morbid, but it’s mostly an excuse for him to talk about music. He cares about music a lot. No, really. A _lot_. He also mixes in personal stories about women he’s loved and lost. It sounds more self-involved than it is. Well, actually, okay it is that self-involved, but it’s funny along the way. Less laugh out loud than Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, though.
I should grab his new book at some point. And Fargo Rock City, his first book.
P.S. To try to keep up with the daily posting schedule, I’ll probably be doing backlogged book reviews on nights when I’m feeling uninspired, as with tonight after my Corporate Finance class.
Reinventing Comics, by Scott McCloud
I liked Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud a lot, because it had a really thoughtful take on why comics worked, and what the conventions were (representing the dimension of time in space, etc.). When I saw this sequel in the library, I picked it up. I didn’t like it nearly as much. Half of the book is a retrospective on the history of comics, which mostly seems like an excuse for McCloud to drop references to obscure comics to demonstrate his comic guru-hood. The book also explores the comics business and his disgust with it, as well as how the business perpetuates a lack of diversity within comics (few women, few minorities, very little work outside of the superhero genre). The last half of the book is an exploration of how the digital age may change comics. I think some of his ideas have some promise (check out I Can’t Stop Thinking!), but overall, nothing really grabbed my attention. I’d call the book a good effort, but not one worth reading unless one is truly obsessed with comics.
The Partly Cloudy Patriot, by Sarah Vowell
My local library branch has a bargain bin outside where they sell books for 50 cents, and this book of essays by Vowell was there, so I pounced on it because I knew and liked Sarah Vowell’s work on NPR’s This American Life. She’s got a wonderfully distinctive voice. And her voice is just as distinctive on the page. Her work is full of bon mots that make you want to turn to somebody and quote them aloud, e.g. “Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship. So when my friends Joel and Stephen and I play hooky from our jobs in the middle of the afternoon to play Pop-A-Shot in a room full of children, I like to think we are not procrastinators; we are patriots pursuing happiness.” I read that line when I picked up the book to decide whether to buy it, and that sold me right there. She takes on a wide variety of subjects in these essays, from examining the political landscape, understanding the true quality of Al Gore’s nerdhood, patriotism, plus the aforementioned Pop-A-Shot. I don’t think Vowell is my new spiritual guru or anything, but she has interesting thoughts and she expresses them well, and that’s about all you can ask of an essayist. Highly recommended.
Amazon link and Official book website
I read this NYT magazine article about Steven Levitt a couple years ago and thought it was great. Levitt is an economist at the University of Chicago who spends his time trying to think up interesting ways to sift data to answer hard questions:
For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients’ best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling corrupt?
When I heard that he and the article’s author, Stephen Dubner, had written a book together, I was psyched. Unfortunately, the book is incredibly shallow. There is basically no information in the book that isn’t in that original article. There’s a little bit more development, some more story telling, but really nothing substantive. It does give references to the papers that Levitt wrote on the various subjects, so if I were motivated, I could go to a library and dig those up. But the book itself provides very little insight into how Levitt thinks, which is a pity.
So, do what I did, and borrow the book. Or just skip the book entirely, read that article, and consider yourself done.
I’ve meant to read this since the day it came out both because I follow baseball and because I’ve liked other books by Michael Lewis, but never got around to it, because I didn’t think it was worth buying. But I finally saw it in my local branch library yesterday, so I picked it up.
It was a quick read, obviously. Nothing too surprising to me – it’s the story of Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s, and the ways he helped develop to exploit market inefficiencies in baseball to keep the A’s competitive despite having one of the lowest budgets in the major leagues. Lewis spends a lot of time describing sabermetrics, but since I’ve been reading Rob Neyer over at ESPN.com for years, I was pretty familiar with the concepts. It’s also interesting how some of the success stories that Lewis details are no longer looking like quite the slam dunks they did at the time of writing, and some of the draft picks that Beane mocks in the book (like Scott Kazmir and Prince Fielder) have turned into quality players. But that’s what happens.
If you’re interested in how the economics lesson of “buy low, sell high” can apply even in such a restricted economy as baseball, and in reading a good story, I’d recommend this. But I was glad I waited to read this from the library, because it’s not a book I can see myself ever re-reading.
Most of my readers will have heard of Nunberg, a Stanford linguistics professor who’s a regular contributor to Fresh Air and the New York Times Week in Review. This book is a collection of pieces from those venues, where he muses amusingly about quirks in our language for a few minutes at a time. I mentioned hearing about it at work, and was able to borrow it from a coworker. Nothing too spectacular. It’s diverting, and that’s about it. That being said, it’s a great bedside book. Lots of essays in three or four page chunks, where you can read one or two before falling asleep, with no temptation to stay up to find out what happens next. But I returned it to my coworker today, and have no desire to buy it for myself.
Subtitled “How I survived the Gold Rush years on the Internet”. I had seen this book around and had some vague interest in reading it, but never got around to it until a friend of mine was giving away a free copy. So I borrowed it and read it. It was pretty nondescript. Wolff tried to ride the Internet wave, and even though he had a fair degree of success, never really bought into what the Internet was enabling, which was the democratization of media. As a writer himself, he felt that “my business, my somewhat unique skill set, was to compose point of view and story and character in such a way that a more or less broadly defined group of people knows what I’m talking about and perhaps even thinks what I want them to think or feels what I want them to feel.” He’s selling his point of view, which he believes to be educated and privileged. Instead, he found out, “the Internet was an instrument through which we were all finding we could exercise a highly individual and idiosyncratic control over the messages we were getting… you could, if you wanted, make your voice as powerful as any other. You could send your own message.” His response? “Good for you. God save us.” The rabble is loose.
Since I think that’s one of the most exciting bits of the internet, I didn’t really feel too much for his sadness as he comes to this realization. And the book itself was kind of dull. Despite reliving the times when everybody was trying to figure out what the internet was good for, from 1994-96, Wolff doesn’t really capture the dreams and anticipation we all felt living through it. Not really worth the read, I’d say.
Several people have highly recommended to me Wallace’s novel,
Infinite Jest, but I’ve been too intimidated by its 1000 page length (of which 300 pages are footnotes) to try it. But when I saw a collection of his essays in the used bookstore, I figured that might be a way to ease in and see if I liked his writing style. And the verdict? I do.
Wallace is a highly talented writer and observer. The book consists of seven essays, written for a variety of magazines about a variety of events, ranging from a tennis tournament to the Illinois State Fair to a Caribbean Cruise. Wallace does a great job of focusing in on the absurdities of a situation, and why we react the way we do. Or at least on why he reacts the way he does. And he writes beautifully (or belletristically, as he would say – he’s one of the few writers in the last ten years for whom I had to use a dictionary). His style does tend to be verbose – the essay on a one week Caribbean Cruise is 100 pages, with pages devoted to insignificant details like the design of the portholes, or the various machinery in his bathroom. But it’s consistently interesting. I especially like his ruminations on the atmosphere of forced fun (with an attitude like We’ve paid to have a fun-filled active vacation, and by golly, we’re going to have one). I also found the footnotes to be entertaining. As one who tends to go off on parenthetical digressions myself (gee, ya think?), I find his work to have lifted the digression to an art form, with footnotes that are often a page long themselves, with references to other footnotes.
A couple of the other essays reveal his deep grounding in postmodern philosophy and critical theory. Actually, all of the essays do, but particularly in the one meditating on the role that television has played on the literary scene, the one that previews David Lynch’s film Lost Highway and reviews Lynch’s work, and, of course, the one reviewing a book that is a survey of poststructuralist critical theory. Since I’m curious about postmodern theory, it was interesting to read his asides on the subject.
I also liked his essay about the tennis tournament, where he is following a tennis pro who’s trying to make The Leap to the top-ranked players – he’s 79th in the world at the time Wallace follows him. And yet, even to make it to that point, this player, Michael Joyce, has sacrificed his entire life, concentrating only on tennis since he was two years old (the essay title is a work of art itself – “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness”). It actually reflects things I’ve been thinking a lot about myself, which is the tension between trying a lot of different things but being mediocre at all of them, or focusing on one thing and getting really good at it, at the cost of not doing anything else. Michael Joyce (and all professional athletes really) are an example of the latter option, and Wallace makes it very clear what Joyce gave up to achieve what he has (hence the reference to “Grotesquerie” in the title). I lean towards the generalist approach currently, but in a world of increasing specialization, where you really have to focus in on something for 20 years to be able to do anything of note, is there really a place for the generalist any more? This is probably fodder for another post at some point. When I’ve thought about it some more. Anyway.
Good stuff. Thoughtful. Well written. I’ll be looking for copy of Infinite Jest at some point. I think it’ll entertain me.
