Category: Books

Unfortunately, my daughter got my genes for nearsightedness. In her teenage years, my wife managed to avoid getting glasses by doing a regular exercise of staring into a pitch black room.

Try getting a seven year old to do that regularly!

Now that I’ve broken forty and my eyesight seems to be on a second round of degeneration, I’ve been assigned this task, to sit in a dark room with the girl for twenty minutes a night.

Fortunately, technology.

We have been listening to audiobooks, courtesy of the library, and she has been plowing through the Magic Treehouse series. Having listened to several of these books, I have two notes.

First, it seems quite negligent for Merlin and Morgan le Fay to send the two children to gratuitously dangerous quests. For example, Jack and Annie were sent to Pompeii the morning before the volcano erupts. If Morgan was going to ship them back in time, couldn’t she have set the dial back a couple days?

Second, it is awfully convenient that the kids are able to communicate with whoever they come across. Obviously, such a conceit is necessary for the stories to work, but I wonder if an immigrant would have written these books. It requires a certain centeredness (or lack of otherness) from being part of the majority culture to have the imagination to ignore such a plot hole. At least the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had the Babelfish.

I should add a third note since these books aren’t for me. My daughter loves these books. She’d (visually) read them all in an afternoon, if we let her, but the whole point is to go through them in these night time sessions. Plus there are plenty of other books for her to read – including the non-fiction “Magic Treehouse Fact Checkers” which accompany many of these books.

---

I should add a fourth note several months later, having completed the series. These books truly aren’t for adults. The plotlines were so cringeworthy that I had to start listening to my own podcasts during these sessions. That said, my daughter still loved the books and they exposed her to plenty of moments in history that she wouldn’t have known otherwise.

She’ll still occasionally revisit the ebooks on her reader, so I think that ultimately remains an endorsement for the series. Fortunately, we’ve now moved on to Newbery Award books and that is much more palatable for me.

After finishing The Magic Treehouse series, I borrowing several Newbery Award winners for our audiobook listening sessions. My daughter read the synopses of these books and was intrigued with the idea of someone who could talk to animals. I was a little surprised by her choice, since she strongly prefers girls as her main characters. Then again, the other books with female protagonists were too scary for her preference (she doesn’t care for tense plots), and she sure does love animals.

At first, it was quite a bit of a shock to go from Mary Pope Osborne’s clear voice to the sounds of a deep, gravelly British man. However our ears caught on quickly and we both enjoyed the story. It was a wide ranging adventure, both in town and out in the world. Given its age, I was worried it would dabble with unsavory stereotypes, but Hugh Lofting managed to avoid such traps. In all, a good time.

My daughter certainly thought so, she borrowed all the Dolittle books from the library (there are quite a few) and plowed through them, even ones that without the illustrations. This book was a wholesome, delightful romp and I see why the Voyages of Dr. Dolittle continues to hold sway a century after its initial publication. The Magic Treehouse introduced our girl to chapter books, but this was her first true excursion into the deeper world of books. Not a bad way to start.

Any child who is not given the opportunity to [meet Doctor Dolittle] and all of his animal friends will miss out on something important.

Jane Goodall

A few weeks ago, I borrowed the audiobook of the John Minford translation of the I Ching, which was a good way to go through all the introductory material, but really quite lousy once it started to go through each hexagram.

I’m not a believer in the divine per se, but I do believe in the unconscious. This translation by Thomas Cleary seemed to be the most straightforward, least western new age woo woo physical copy that was available at the library.

It is a lovely pocket paperback. Just the straight text with a short introduction and minimal notes at the end. It was good to first meet the I Ching by walking (often confusedly) through the text without any commentary to clog the flow.

The simplicity of this format helped me wrap my head around the framework of the book. It let my mind start to feel the contours of this world, the hexagrams flowing one after another, flipping back and forth.

Even so, I must be admit that the damn book (the original, not the translation) is a word salad. This isn’t a bad thing (I suspect that’s why it continues to speak effectively to querents), but there is no denying that the text can feel like bunch of images that don’t make much coherent sense.

Then again, it’s been making sense for millennia, so there must be something there. Does the emperor have no clothes? Maybe not this time. I sense that there is something here, even though the pieces are not logically tied together.

Ultimately, I’ve purchased a copy of the several translations for long term reference. This small book was a good introduction to the I Ching and will stay on my shelves until someone puts it on hold at the library, but I don’t feel a need to purchase my own copy.

---

Since writing the first draft of this post, I have gotten really into the I Ching. I appreciate this translation as in my personal history since it introduced me to the book. However, I don’t ever reference this translation when I conduct a reading. I’ve stopped pulling it off the shelf, preferring my Minford, Wilhem/Baynes, Lynn, Richter, and Richmond versions. There is something to be said for being available at the right time, but I fear that may be the best one can say about it.

I’ve been a fan of reforming meetings but have had difficulty thinking about how to do it.

I enjoyed the book Read this Before the Next Meeting, a short book by Al Pitampalli, which emphasized decision making and preparation before a meeting. This was a good start because the advice fits nicely with my preference to solve problems one-on-one, but it was a myopic in its proposed solution.

Death by Meeting takes a different tack by emphasizing the need for meetings is to unearth and expose conflict. This allows all players to put their views on the table for an open resolution. It is an appealing approach, though it will take some thinking in how to implement this, especially as a lower level employee within the organization.

The other key point of the book is to categorize the meetings: five-minute huddles, weekly “tactical” check-ins, monthly strategy sessions, and quarterly off-sites. These categorizations don’t match my professional experience as a bit player outside of the C suite, however I like the idea of categorizing one’s meetings, so that each type can be fine tuned for fit.

When I was in production architecture, I would always push back against management’s assumption that a draftsman could just cut-and-paste old details. No one should start from scratch, but fact one needs to draw another detail means that this is a unique condition. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions for such problems. Even so, details should be categorized and sorted, careful organization is the art of putting together a set.

Similarly, I think my role is to find a proper categorization for the multitude of meetings that I encounter in my position. From there, I need to envision how each of those meetings could be made more effective. Then I will need to consider my position (as low man internally, or main client on projects) to figure how to encourage change.

Along with streamlining asynchronous communications, I think this will be a pretty interesting exercise for the next few years.

---

In the half year since I wrote the first draft, I’ve written an extended blog post about weekly check-ins for projects and started a weekly check-in with my supervisor as well as a bi-weekly check-in for my digital signature side project at the office. I have not made any revisions to the weekly Owner Architect Contractor meetings, though I have been holding them as video conferences (with job walks on a separate day) which I think that works fairly well.

It looks like I will be deep in design for the next year, so it will be interesting to see how that process might be managed differently in a post-pandemic videoconference centric world.

A few years ago, I borrowed this book from the library only to read a couple pages before returning it. Fortunately, the occasional recommendations of Taleb at rvltr reminded me to pick this book up again.

This time around, I got the audio book and by the time I had reached the place where I had been previously dropped off, I realized this was an absolutely brilliant little book.

What changed?

It wasn’t the format. This book is best as a physical hardcopy, as an object lying around the house to be randomly accessed, to be pondered a couple lines at a time. An audio book is actually the perfectly wrong format for this book.

So what changed? How did I see brilliance after missing it in its best light? Well, my brain is has changed. In the past year, I finally kicked my Facebook addiction and minimized my use of Boardgamegeek. I’ve always had good boundaries around Twitter and Linkedin, but I’ve strangled my use of those services as well. Thank god I never got sucked into Instagram or Tiktok.

Getting control over these digital vices has not only freed up precious free time, it has made a big difference in how my mind processes the world around me.

Can you imagine it? I wasn’t mentally concentrated enough to read a short book of pithy proverbs! We are going to look back at the early 21st century as a dark age of constant distraction from the computers in our pockets.

My twenties had cigarettes, my thirties had social media. At the moment, I regret the latter more than the former. Let’s hope this decade doesn’t come with its own a regrettable addiction.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

Taleb

---

Back to the book for a moment. It’s fucking brilliant. Not every aphorism will be applicable to you, but when it hits, the punch packs a wallop. I read and listened (at 1.0x speed) to each copy separately, basically reading it twice in quick succession. I did not notice a major difference between the original audiobook and the expanded ebook. Both are fine but neither are ideal formats for full appreciation of this book. I suspect that I will eventually purchase a hardcopy, since it was designed for manual serendipity. However, it is also fair to note that I don’t love it enough to make a stand against my wife’s current campaign against new book physical purchases.

---

Three months later. Even though I still haven’t purchased a copy, I suspect that this will be my most influential book of the year. It was nice that it spurred me to listen to Anti-Fragile, but more importantly it ignited my recent push towards reading ancient wisdom literature, such as the Havamal, I Ching, Bhagavad Gita, Analects, etc.

One of Taleb’s aphorisms starts “Read no book less than 100 years old…”, It seems that I’ve multiplied that advice by ten or twenty. I wonder how long this personal trend will last.

The first half of the book is an exercise of being seen. Walker Evans pushes his subjects to look into the camera. The subject directly looks at the observer, drawing you into their American experience. The distance of eight decades is inescapable, but it is also impossible to miss universality of our humanity.

The second half of the book is a crisply focused, a clinical series of distant townscapes and cityscapes. Every photograph is empty of humanity aside from our built structures.

Upon reflection Walker Evan’s stance becomes clear. America is both her people and its context.

But it isn’t clear what came first. Maybe it’s an irrelevant question. We shape our environment, and it shapes us. We are its residue as we leave our mark.

---

This book is rightly a classic, the craft is taut and the voice is clear. The only sour note is the turgid essay at the end of the book, so just skip the afterword. I have no regrets buying this book, primarily because the local library didn’t have its own copy (a damn shame). Even so, of the making of books there is no end, and I haven’t been back to this one over the past couple months.

There is a downside to listening to a ton of Seth Godin interviews – this book was thoroughly trod before I got my turn to borrow the audiobook from Overdrive.

The basic conceit of the Practice is reasonable. Our job is to do the work, but the outcome lies in the hands of the gods….so goddammit go execute your process.

I found it intriguing that Seth structured the book as a numeric series of essays (ending in the 220’s), but I don’t grok what he was trying to get out of such a structure. Maybe I should borrow the ebook to look for the payoff of such a framework, but it is telling I haven’t bothered to do so in the two months since I wrote the first draft of this post.

I’m coming to think that The Dip, with a simple counterintuitive concept written in a brutally concise format, will be Seth’s book that lasts longest in the mind’s eye. Linchpin, Seth’s self acknowledged masterwork, was also great, but I have to admit that it already has a dated aura to it.

In the end, I like the basic premise of The Practice, but I must wonder if it was longer than necessary to drive the point home. I’ll give Seth the benefit of the doubt, but even if the final product is “not bad” did it reach greatness? I guess asking the question is the answer. Seth’s batting average is incredibly high, but not every work can be a masterpiece.

---

The one concept from the book that has stayed with me over the past few months is Seth’s distinction between “instigating change” versus an “artful hobby”. He believes both routes are viable paths for an endeavor, even though he openly focuses on the former. It’s a stark decision and I’ve become increasingly comfortable with the fact that this is an “artful hobby”, following the model of Scripting.com instead of Seths.blog.

I picked up the book soon after I finally purchased Robert Frank’s The Americans and Walker Evan’s American Photographs. Amazon’s algorithm saw a trend and kept placing this book in front of me until I caved.

Fortunately, the algorithm did right. I fully enjoyed this snapshot of America in the early 90’s.

Kubota is the most sincere photographer I’ve read. He keeps a respectful distance from his subject, presents them without comment, avoids personal flourishes, and maintains the fourth wall between the photograph and the reader.

I was intrigued by his ability to seem so anonymous within his work. Like the dog who didn’t bark, it takes a while before you notice the fact he worked so carefully to stay out of the frame. His only stylistic device is a tendency to go high, whether a step ladder or on a blimp. Even then, this was noticed largely because he admits to it in the introduction.

At a contextual level, it was also interesting to note how many of these three decade old photos would be considered subpar in today’s world. The aerial night shots of Vegas are completely blurred, something you’d expect of a frame capture from a youtube video. Such aerial shots were possibly magnificent in their time, but such technical and logistical feats have lost their punch in an era where my contractor is producing a weekly high definition drone video of my construction site.

Even so, Kubota’s photographs still hold up on the ground and in the crowd. Maybe the reason they’ve stayed fresh because my nostalgia of these years when America was on the ascendency after the fall of the Soviets.

However, I’d like to think they hold up artistically because he scrupulously avoided forcing a stylistic signature in his work. Asian Americans are often frustrated by our invisibility within larger society. In this case, Kubota used it to his great advantage.

This assessment might be an idiosyncratic preference – Kubota’s out of print books are not overpriced in the secondary market. Even so, I can think of no higher compliment than to mention that I’ve purchased two more of his books, China and Out of the East, this time without the insistent prompting of the algorithm.

You are what you eat. Not a novel assertion, but this book was enjoyable because of the many ways that Versfeld explored this concept.

He advocates for a simple and earthy enjoyment of food via a refined book liberally seasoned with references and allusions from all throughout literate history. My intimate understanding of the Bible, a working familiarity with Greek and Roman mythology, generic feel for the contours of Western philosophy, and recent forays into ancient Chinese thought, all turned out to be surprisingly useful for enjoying this book.

As I grow older (and disillusioned with the gift of the internet) I find myself becoming more curmudgeonly concerning my information consumption. I have always been skeptical about fads that valorize a classical “great-books” education, but I have to admit that such a rarified syllabus is obviously better fare than a constant barrage of opinion pieces (such as this post) that are indiscriminately published on the web.

In these days of easy edutainment, it is difficult to slow down and read a book. A book is a journey that takes time and mental effort to inhabit. It is much harder to develop understanding than to collect trophies. Unfortunately, social media is all about collecting trophies to satisfy our basest emotional instincts. The quick hit of a hot take is a fleeting pleasure that have been weaponized by our favorite tech companies. The only way I’ve been able to sidestep this dilemma has to cut social media out my life.

I’ve uninstalled all the apps and am logged out on my browsers. I haven’t deleted my accounts, because I will occasionally reference old posts and keep contacts alive in private messages. I’m not perfect, so I’ll sometimes slip into surfing these feeds, but the more I stay away from the addiction, the easier it’s been to avoid mindlessly returning to these infinite pages.

In reading about habits, you will come across the trope of “never skip two days”. It’s bad enough to miss one day, but you’re in real danger if you miss two in a row. My advice for cutting out social media is the inverse. The hardest step in avoiding a site is the second day. Once you get past that point, it is relatively easy to avoid such sites for multiple weeks.

Breaking the social media habit was most among my greatest accomplishments over the past year, along with losing weight, and getting myself back on a regular schedule of posting self-righteous puffery on this little platform of my own.

In all, I quite enjoyed the book. I don’t think it will be in the regular rotation, but I think this will be a book that I will happily rediscover on my shelves every few years. Kind of like finding an old friend on Facebook.

What struck me was the foreignness of it all.

Is the jungle in Madagascar truly more exotic than a dump in England? What is stranger: the birds who fly the seas eating any scrap of edible looking trash or the people who obsessively chase them?

I have no interest in bird watching, but this book was a compelling read.

Any endeavor fully pursued begins to weave together the entire world. A singular focus on one subject becomes a window on the universe. Though they come from the sea and the air, these gulls are now intertwined with our human world, inhabiting our cities and farms. The landfill is a record of our activities, a living testament of who we were yesterday. The categorizations of these birds highlight our scientific era’s obsession with creating ever finer distinctions of specificity.

Tim Dee’s anecdotes in the field and interviews with experts transforms this niche subject into a exploration of humanity. The book is an example of how a deftly managed lens becomes a mirror that reveals our other selves.

The world is rich, we just need to truly look.