Category Archives: Books

“Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell

OutlierGeologically speaking, the rock above is not an outlier, it is a Glacial erratic, but it is the closest I could get with one of my pictures. Still, Gladwell’s book, Outliers, The Story of Success, is not about geology, it is about very successful people and how big a part luck – both regular luck and deep luck – played in their success. It is pretty typical of the kind of book I like and that all fit into a, sort of, Matrix category. These are the kind of books that says here is what seems like reality and the reasons we are told for that reality, but there are other, deeper, reasons. I should also add that I very often buy into these deeper reasons and I have completely bought into Malcolm Gladwell’s arguments.

Two factoids that are especially interesting are that almost all professional hockey players were born in the first half of the year and that the Chinese way of writing numbers makes basic math much easier.

Professional hockey players are mostly born in the earlier part of the year because Canadian Youth Hockey Leagues segregate players by age, based on the calendar year. So, a five-year old, born on January 1st is about twenty percent older than a youngster born in December of the same year and they play in the same age bracket. At five years old, another year  makes a big difference. The older kids do better and are encouraged to work at hockey while the younger kids get discouraged, work less, and fall behind setting a pattern – in hockey at least – the results of which carry through to the Pros or notPros.

As for the numbers, add fifty-three and thirty-five in your head. It is hard to do without converting to Arabic numerals, 53 plus 35. In Chinese, those numbers are written as five-tens three and three-tens five. The logic of the numbers is written into the language making it much easier to work with them.

Gladwell weaves details like this into a new narrative about several successful people including Bill Gates and the Beatles. It’s fascinating and a very easy read.

 

Wolf Hall

Cromwell-ThomasTo achieve anything, you must be prepared to dabble on the boundary of disaster. Stirling Moss

I started reading Wolf Hall, a week or so ago, and I am both admiring the audacity of the book and loving the writing. A confession is due here, when I started reading the book, I thought it was a book about Oliver Cromwell and I couldn’t figure out why the dates didn’t line-up. The book is about  Thomas Cromwell, one of England’s, agreed upon, bad guys – I am told every English schoolchild knows that, like we know John Wilkes Booth is a bad guy – and is most remembered as the foil to the good guy, the Man of All Seasons, Thomas More.

First off, it is a book complimentary – at least so far – of Thomas Cromwell. But history is written by the victors, and Cromwell was not, eventually,  one of them, so who know if he was really a bad guy? Either way, the entire book is written from Cromwell’s point of view and it can be confusing. In a sentence like, The king walked into the room. He says Good Morning, it is Cromwell saying Good Morning. Often, I have to circle back to understand what was said, by whom.

The lyrical, almost poetic – no! really poetic – writing, however, is the book’s biggest joy. Sometimes it just stops me in my tracks, like when, at Christmas, Cromwell is thinking about the last year: No year has brought such devastation. His sister Kat, her husband, Morgan Williams, have been plucked from this life as fast as his daughters were taken, one day walking and talking and the next day cold as stones, tumbled into their Thames-side graves, dug in beyond reach of the tide, beyond sight and smell of the river; deaf now to the sound of Putney’s cracked church bell, to the smell of wet ink, of hops, of malted barley, and the scent, still animal, of woolen bales; dead to the autumn aroma of pine resin and apple candles, of soul cakes baking.

Often I don’t finish a book like this, my ADD and dyslexia kick in and I just get bogged down. I have tried Gravity’s Rainbow a half dozen times and Infinite Jest about as much. I marvel at the language  of the first twenty five pages and then the rowing gets too tough. I end up saying I will read it tomorrow, for two weeks, while I read New Yorker Book Reviews and an Economist article on riots in the Ukraine. But Wolf Hall is pulling me along with its story. I am concerned for Thomas and still thrilled at how well he is doing.

 

 

 

Lost in Reamde

On a rainy fall day, there is almost nothing better than curling up with a good book in front of the fireplace. For me, this fall, the book has been Reamde by Neil Stephenson. But, now it is a bright sunny day and the book still has me in its clutches. To quote from the New York times book review:

Let us say that novelists are like unannounced visitors. While Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow pound manfully on the door, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith knock politely, little preparing you for the emotional ferociousness with which they plan on making themselves at home. Neal Stephenson, on the other hand, shows up smelling vaguely of weed, with a bunch of suitcases. Maybe he can crash for a couple of days? Two weeks later he is still there. And you cannot get rid of him. Not because he is unpleasant but because he is so interesting.

This is the kind of book that it is easy to get lost in, easy to be transported to a new place in . The world on the printed page becomes more real than the real world which fades to being only a distraction from the book. Lord of the Rings was like that. I think that I read Lord of the Rings about three times over a six year period. I knew I was hooked when I would try to catch a few paragraphs while stopped at traffic lights. Another, for me, was Shogun by James Clavell.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer – for some strange reason – was one of those books and it started me on a World War II binge.

Not that Stephenson always makes it easy: his characters usually have goofy names that are hard to pronounce like Richard Forthrast, they are sort of improbable, and the first hundred pages are setup. But then it takes off, much like Shogun, in an episodic blast. Each event leads to another with consequences that seems both improbable and,  somehow,  inevitable.  Along the way, while we are running at full speed, Stephenson – running alongside and whispering in our ear – explains the world. For example, a British handler explains to a spy how the American counter-terrorist system works:

The American national security apparatus is very large and unfathomably complex…. It has many departments and subunits that, one supposes, would not survive a top-to-bottom overhaul. This feeds on itself as individual actors, despairing of ever being able to make sense of it all, create their own little ad hoc bits that become institutionalized as money flows toward them. Those who are good at playing the political game are drawn inward to Washington. Those who are not end up sitting in hotel lobbies in places like Manila, waiting for people like you.

How can a nice, sunny, fall, day compete with that?

 

 

 

 

pas·to·ral [pas-ter-uhl], Pastoral, American Pastoral

Five Men Of A Wellington 1

A couple of years ago, Richard Taylor – or, maybe, Tracy, or, probably, both – recommended that I read Philip Roth's American Pastoral. It just seemed slow. The plot sort of fluttered around, like a moth around a light. Yes, there were passages that were like a flash going off in a dark room; illuminating a moment, a scene, that perfectly caught the sixty's disintegration, but it wasn't a moment belonging to my generation – more my parent's generation – and I couldn't warm up to it. Not liking a book recommended by two people whose judgment I respect and I usually agree with – although, I suspect, I am much more low brow in my tastes than they are – is disconcerting. Even more so when the book wins the Pulitzer Prize and is on almost everybody's list of great American novels. Still, as much as I wanted to like it, I didn't.

Eventually, I learned to live with the disappointment.

A couple of weeks ago, Catherine Santos gave me a copy of Nevil Shute's Pastoral. Shute had the common decency to put, across from the front page – PASTORAL, n. A poem which describes the scenery and life of the country. (mus.) a simple melody. As I read Shute's Pastoral, the lights slowly came on.

Both books are describing the scenery and life of their time. Some physical scenery, but more emotional scenery. And the description in both books is much softer and simpler than the actual, horrific events that are taking place. The horrific events are the background to the simple, everyday actions of the protagonists. Like falling in love or being overwhelmed by despair.

Shute's pastoral takes place on a RAF bomber station in England during the early part of World War II. It is a love story between a young pilot and an W.A.A.F officer. It is a soft  – I can't find a better word – story of hope in a world of horror. The hope is bright; the horror dim. For example:

She got a letter from him punctually by the first post on Tuesday morning, and read it in the privacy of her room. She answered it on Tuesday afternoon, when she was supposed to be resting for the coming operation, which was Düsseldorf. She spent the night on duty out at the group W/T station. That night twenty two machines left Hartley Magna. Sixteen came back, one landed in Essex, the crew of one bailed out near Guildford, and four failed to return altogether.

Roth's pastoral takes place in New Jersey as the post war generation's world starts to fall apart. It is a world that the hero, Swede Levov, a second generation secular Jew, thought had been made safe by America's prosperity and the orderliness of his life. But the hope of the young lovers has been obliterated and Swede had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no
sense.
He carefully learned the rules only to find out that The old system that made order doesn't work anymore. All that was left
was his fear and astonishment, but now concealed by nothing.


A-family-on-their-lawn-one-sunday-in-1968
 

The books are strangely complimentary, although strangely might not be the right word, because it is hard to believe that
Roth didn't know about Shute's Pastoral when he wrote his American
Pastoral
. Together, the two books are terrific.Hell, American Pastoral by itself is terrific.

Who we are vs. who we want to be dept.


I have never played a MMO – Massively multiplayer online – game or, even, seen one played. All I know about them is from reading Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. As I understand it, the players can pretty much make their avatars anybody or thing. What they come up with is pretty interesting.

From a book by Robbie Cooper via a blog called The Swedish Bed here are some real people and their avatars.

Robbiecooperavatars1
 
Robbiecooperavatars3

Robbiecooperavatars7