Category: Books

After reading this novel, I have to admit that I’m good on Chandler for a bit. He’s stylish and enjoyable, but my current woke self can only handle so many offensive passages from seven decades ago. Plus, I’ve had enough plot twists and turns to keep me satisfied for a while. The gratuitousness of the plot twists are feel especially over the top because Phillip Marlowe is a Mary Sue; he’s a little too perfect underneath his gruff exterior.

Even so, this book holds up for what it is. The Big Sleep is a blast of energy, the Long Goodbye is a bit of an forelorn meditation, and Farewell my Lovely is beautiful ode to a long lost Los Angeles.

Chandler painted a complete portrait of a city. You feel the heat of the sidewalk, the cold of the beach, the muggy air of Downtown before air conditioning. It’s not just Chandler of course, his words are mixed in the mind’s eye with all the iconic Hollywood images from that era. But still, its his book and he’s placed you in a unified total environment.

I suspect I’ll be revisiting this book at some point, if only for nostalgia’s sake. A nostalgia for world that came and went thirty years before my birth.

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After rereading these books and writing this post months ago, I’ve kept my threat in the first paragraph. I’ve avoided mysteries by slipping into an esoteric spiritual bent. Then again, philosophy encapsulates just as many counterintuitive twists and turns as a detective novel. Its just at a logical-cosmic level. I wonder when the wheel will turn and I’m back to reading some Agatha Christie.

When I started rereading this book, I was prepared to dislike the experience, thinking that the new me was out of sync with the old me.

The first time I read the Big Sleep, it felt like an explosion of energy, but a passage of a decade made it feel like the spazmatic tantrums of a frustrated man. Even though there are still some problematic passages in The Long Goodbye, and this book takes a while to get rolling, I found that it held up to my high regard over the past decade.

This book is a powerful, scathing indictment of the wealthy folks in “Idle Valley”. However, it also holds a certain charm. Chandler took an elegiac tone, musing upon the debasement of the upper class, mirrored in Phillip Marlowe’s relationship with Terry Lennox. In portraying the rottenness of the residents of Idle Valley, Chandler paints them as actors trapped within the circumstances of their making, birds of their own gilded cages. The players in the novel have created a dysfunctional microcosm within wealthy Los Angeles of mid-century America.

The book is a critique of our corrupt nation, the dynamics of our high society, and the individuals who create it. Chandler carefully walks the fine line between being sympathetic and judgmental towards the plights of his characters. As with much great art, the ambivalence is what makes this book such a lovely read.

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While editing this post, I was reminded of the Robert Altman movie adaptation that I watched around the time I first read these books (rest in peace, Blockbuster). While I can’t remember any details except for one particularly violent scene, I recall that it was an intriguing counter-intuitive take on noir. I’m not surprised it did poorly in the box office. The movie was a slow burn that didn’t feel like it took you anywhere. Such moodiness made it feel all the more brilliant for a wannabe auteur like me.

The publisher Chelsea Green had a huge sale at the end of fall last year. My main goals were The Art of Fermentation and the Growing Things to Eat in a Hotter Drier Land, but I also picked up a few deeply discounted books that caught my eye.

While big books are naturally the publisher’s flagships, it was the selection of interesting quirky books like Cheddar and Landfill that cemented my admiration of Chelsea Green. I am normally quick to unsubscribe from newsletters, but I’ve kept my subscription because their catalog comfortably inhabits the intersection of ecology and personal activity, with their emphasis on cookbooks, natural building, and agriculture.

As in boardgaming, big publishers gobble up the industry but the niche publishers have a brand because they hold a point of view. Their imprint stands for something. Even though I don’t read their blog posts, I stay subscribed because I don’t want to miss hearing about a sale.

As for the book itself, my first thought is that the author was the perfect person to write this book. His role is to be a better version of a reader who would be interested in a book solely about one type of cheese. Like me, he comes from the city but really knows his knows cheese. He’s a professional but not totally divorced from agriculture. A foodie but renowned enough to be judging food competitions. He is interested in the world around us but isn’t a snob. He has opinions but is not dogmatic. His anecdotes nicely captures in the Bay Area, the fun, the cost, the tensions.

His writing style was bit more casual than I expected, but after getting comfortable with his voice, Cheddar was a fun quick read.

The book is highly recommended if you are interested in our society’s tense personal relationship with food. His ruminations on cheddar follow the journey of our nation, from its agricultural origins through factory development into pure full blown mechanization, and then back to the new pastoral agricultural foodie myth.

As with many good non-fiction books, Cheddar is ultimately a story about us.

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The last paragraph in my first draft was, “Sure would be nice to get my hands on a cloth wrapped cheddar, but that would involve going into a grocery store right in the midst of a nasty pandemic.” Now that the vaccine has rolled out en masse in America, this statement would no longer be applicable for most folks. However my wife wants to stay in the cave until the kids gets their vaccines, pushing us to the end of the year. So my wait continues.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.