GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Books

  • Taking Things Seriously, Joshua Glenn & Carol Hayes, 2007

    This book is a cute collection of 75 nano-nonfictions. Little windows into the lives of the contributors, revealing a larger window in to the authors’ realities.

    I have a standard critique of NPR radio programming that gets overless precious, and many essays comes close to crossing the line, but the photographs ground the collection.

    Whatever the text may emote, the image of a “thing” to keeps the pairings from falling into pure sentimentality.

    It’s a fun quick read, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to find it.

    I have a note in the front cover that I got it from Half Price books on 28 November 2008. So I suspect this was pick up on one of the two Black Friday’s where I ended up winning a $200 gift cards from that store.

    Was it worth lugging around between two cities and four houses over twelve years before finally getting read while in exile in the midst of a pandemic?

    Doubtful, but it does got a nice backstory.

  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a memoir, Haruki Murakami, 2007

    I heard about this book on an interview of Brian Koppelman on the Tim Ferris podcast. Brian recommended this book highly, and it makes sense given other books that he recommends. This memoir is the non-melodramatic version of the War of Art, which makes it a far superior book.

    There is very little about writing in this book, but when Murakami talks about writing, it pops. Especially when he takes a couple pages in the middle of the book to discuss the three key ingredients to making it as a novelist – talent, focus, and endurance.

    That passage alone is worth the cost of the book if one is an aspiring writer.

    I’m not an aspiring writer, but I am an occasional blogger and a slob who has always known the need to get off the couch and start exercising.

    He doesn’t glamorize running either.

    Running is both the subject and the metaphor.

    Put one foot in front of the other. Again and again.

    He doesn’t claim any particular epiphanies during his runs. He just enjoys the solitude of running. But that is quite comforting as well.

    As I’ve broken forty, I’ve become a better at getting bored. During this quarantine, I’ve started talking walks on a regular basis. Just a mile or two sprinkled with the occasional 10k.

    It’s nice to exercise without expectation, not waiting for the runner’s high or some special insight. Just log a few more miles, one foot in front of another.

    Coda:
    As pedestrian as this book may be, it has resulted in three key decisions. Few books can claim such an impact on my life, even if it only lasts a short duration.

    1. I’ve decided to read the entirety of Murakami’s english-translated ouvre. His writing is so forcefully delicate, personal and piercing, that I need to read it all. I had considered this exercise years ago, but his books had not yet been widely translated. They are now, and I have no excuse.
    2. I’m quitting self help books. I’ve known for the longest time they are the junk food of non-fiction prose – quick easy reads that makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something but invariably leave you empty after a few days. Just as John Maxwell quit reading for pleasure to focus on his study of leadership, I am going to quit work related reading so I can focus on life.
    3. I think I will refocus this blog with a new tag line “thoughts on my consumption”. My excursion into daily blogging last year was an interesting practice, but without a center the experiment felt rootless. “Write every day” may be a rule that works for many people, but I found myself being starved of input, since I was spending all my free solitude keeping up with the next blog post. “Write about any book that I’ve read” may result in a better balance between input and output. It doesn’t require constant output, but it doesn’t allow the blog to lie fallow for extended periods. Plus, it also addresses my great fear of becoming merely a passive consumer. We’ll see where this goes!

  • Count Zero, William Gibson, 1986

    I revisited Count Zero, the second of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, for maybe the fourth or fifth time since I first read it in college.

    It’s odd to think that I’m further from my initial reading of the book than my first reading of the book was from its publication date. I guess that’s life, it keeps moving forward, but some artifacts keep staying along for the ride, and Count Zero is one of them.

    This book is the tightest, cleanest, and meanest of the trilogy. Almost a novella compared to its older and younger siblings. That’s why I love it. It feels effortless. It’s a story that says plety but doesn’t try to tell you anything.

    It seems odd that I still enjoy such a simple rip roaring genre yarn as a middle aged adult comfortably ensconced in the desert with a prototypical family of four. But then again, I’m not any more sophisticated than my collegiate self, just more willing to embrace the same old dopeyness.

    Certainly nostalgia plays a big part. The heavy, physical tech brings warm memories from computer class elementary school, descriptions of cyberspace resonating with flashy MTV logos, even as the direct neural connections of jacking-in seeming so gauche in this wireless age.

    As I walk around my Vegas suburb thinking of the book I just reread, it seems the real world has ended up closer to the gleaming spotless clones of Star Wars prequels, but during this time of pandemic, it feeling that the decrepit barbarism of Gibson’s Sprawl is just around the corner.

  • EntreLeadership, Dave Ramsey, 2011

    Given the guests on the podcast with the same name, I went ahead and borrowed EntreLeadership from the library. The book is a simple, quick enjoyable read.

    Admittedly, I’ve never run a business and have no intention to do so in the future. However the book seems like it could be a good primer spanning for a would be entrepreneur, even if much of the topics are covered elsewhere (such as Covey’s 4 quadrants, or Ziglar’s 7 spoke Wheel of life).

    However there is one piece of advice that did not sit well with me. He proudly flaunts his “no gossip” policy, which is a fireable offense. It seemed odd to me, so I slipped onto the internet and came across the Daily Beast expose on his exceedingly heavy handed leadership practices.

    Then it all snapped in focus. This is a man who has been the boss so long he has forgotten what it is like to be an employee. He has no idea that his position as the founder and owner is a singular one. His perspective is applicable only to himself.

    Just flip one of his other exhortations around. He wants each of his employees to act like entrepreneurs. So if I’m running my own little freelance gig, shouldn’t I talk with my fellow freelancers about market conditions? Shouldn’t I make sure that my primary client is treating me fairly? Shouldn’t I “gossip”?

    I get that employees should not waste their time bellyaching at the break room. It is better if they bring up concerns to their management so the problems can be fixed. However, that type of trust is earned, not demanded.

    This writer has been boss so long, he has mistaken great culture with a populace that has been cowed into submission. And that too is a classic mistake entrepreneurs make.

  • One Small Step Can Change your Life, Robert Maurer, 2004

    I recently went on a Kaizen kick borrowing all the books on this subject from the library.

    Most were straightforward business books from the mid to late 90’s, before the malaise that hit Japan and mad the subject less of a juicy marketable subject.

    But One Small Step Can Change Your Life, by Dr. Maurer, was an interesting self help book where the main premise is that very small steps can ultimately be very fruitful, hence the title. It is a very optimistic book, with quite a few examples from both business and historical lore as well as personal interactions by the author.

    Like any self help book, it is a persuasive hamburger – it starts and ends by selling you on the effectiveness of of the topic with a multiple steps process in the body of the text.

    In this case, you are given a primer on kaizen as a business practice and then some examples on how this approach can be applied to one’s personal life. This book’s six-point program consists of:

    • Ask Small Questions
    • Think Small Thoughts
    • Take Small Actions
    • Solve Small Problems
    • Bestow Small Rewards
    • Identify Small Moments

    And then it closes with a reminder that kaizen is good for both for changing course on bad habits (or jumpstarting inactivity) as well as stacking gains on top of previous successes.

    The basic premise is that sustainable change comes from small steps that are consistently applied over a long period of time. This stands in contrast to the “innovation” or bootcamp mentality – which are banking on shocks to the system to make lasting change.

    The issue with the drastic change approach is that sometimes the system will often bend but snap back into place – the inertia is too much. Kaizen is small so it is immediately actionable, and it entails such small steps that the recalcitrant system doesn’t know what hit it.

    Coincidentally, I listened to a podcast about meditation and one of the suggestions for creating a practice is to just aim to meditate for 1- minute every day. While such a goal may seem ridiculously paltry, it creates a habit and it creates opportunities where you decide to meditate for more than a minute. While the decision to go an extra minute may also seem miniscule, the podcaster noted this choice was actually quite momentous. That first minute is motivated by an extrinsic factor (your previous commitment to meditate for a minute every day) but the second minute is voluntary and motivated by intrinsic factors now that your obligation has been satisfied.

    This seems to me to encapsulate the spirit of this book. Make a small step and the ride the wave to continuous improvement.

  • A short list of Books

    I was rereading Damn Good Advice by George Lois and I realized it is most likely one of my favorite self help books along with Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.

    Then there are the two Jocko Willink and Leif Babin leadership books, Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership. The first is clear and concise, the second is a necessary counterbalance to the literally extreme title.

    And then Seth Godin’s most recent book This is Marketing, as well as his older classic The Dip. The first book is about selling, or as he defines it, making change in the world. The second is about quitting fast versus having grit and trying to navigate both great options.

    And I need to re-read the massive tome Design for Ecological Democracy by my first architecture professor, Randy Hester.

    Honorable mentions:
    The One Thing
    Essentialism
    Dale Carnegie
    Do it Tomorrow
    The Leadership Pipeline

    Throw in some “impractical” books like Invisible Cities and Labyrinths and that’s not a bad reading list at all.

  • Charlie Parker Played Bebop, Chris Raschka, 1992

    The girl is reading now, and we recently read Chris Raschka’s Charlie Parker Played Bebop together. The book is a brilliant play on word, image, sound, and absurdity.

    Never leave your cat alone.

    If you read it silently, it doesn’t seem like much, but read it with a preschooler and ham it up and the silly logic of the book opens up after several readings. I’m not a jazz expert, but it captures the feel and energy of bebop.

    On a semi related note, the girl just read to me Cindy Ward and Tomie dePaola’s Cookie’s Week. Don’t leave that cat alone either.

  • Sorting out our library

    After half a decade of buying cheap books at the friends of the library store, we now have enough volumes to fill up six slots of the Ikea Kallax shelves. So the girl and I sorted out our own private library this weekend.

    The first division we made was fiction and non-fiction, which were then sorted the rest out by author’s last name. Apart from confusing the illustrators and authors, and a child’s tendency to get distracted it went really smoothly. Some highlights from the exercise included:

    • She immediately decided talking animals were unreal and they all went into the fiction pile.
    • Human slice of life books generally ended up in the non-fiction pile.
    • ABC books ended up in the non-fiction pile, except for one which had talking animals. I guess she takes linguistics pretty seriously.
    • Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen also ended up in the non-fiction pile. Even though most of the contents are quite fantastical, my daughter pointed out the book is a dream sequence, thus for real. Somehow, Where the Wild Things Are did not get the same treatment and went into fiction.
    • A book on Noah’s Ark ended up in the non-fiction pile. I thought about discussing the myth of Gilgamesh but thought better of it.
    • An illustrated copy of the Night Before Christmas also ended up in non-fiction. I pointed out the drawing of flying reindeer, but she responded that they must have flown in the past. We have never pushed the Santa myth (all our Christmas presents come from humans) but I decided this was not the time to do a hard debunk of old Saint Nick.

    In all, it was a fun exercise. It was quite interesting to go through all the books we’ve collected over the past few years, and even better to plumb the depths of a five year old mind.

  • Checklists, Atul Gawande, 2009

    One of my favorite books is Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto.

    The other day I had to pull some photos off the phone so I decided to write one up so my wife could do so later.

    Yikes, what a convoluted process.

    I mean, I always knew it was a convoluted process, but this exercise really highlighted how convoluted it is.

    Looks like I have some streamlining to do.

    Or maybe not. Could be that this extra effort is worth not buying another computer or hard drive.

  • Dao De Jing, Laozi, (Ursula K. Le Guin) and Zhuangzi, (Thomas Merton)

    With my recent dive into the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi I’ve been been reminded that some authors are just better at writing in english than others.

    Admittedly the goals of these different translations were divergent – some of them are actual translations while others are only renditions.

    Not surprisingly however, the books that gave up fidelity to the original text gained the freedom to really write fluently in the new language.

    I’m certain the imprimatur of a famous author didn’t hurt my reception of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching or Thomas Merton’s Chuang Tzu. But then again higher expectations often lead to greater disappointment.

    In these two cases, they did not disappoint. Their years of writing for a popular audiences prepared them with the subtle tools to excel in their craft, and it shows.