Category: Books

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.

This is an ambitious endeavor, covering fermentation in all its forms, all over the world.

After getting into sourdough baking, I developed a preference for “scientific” cookbooks, using weight measurements (metric) with page layouts that are clearly formatted for ease of visual discrimination as one skims the the work. However, all these books invariably ended up being messy and touchy feely when describing how to develop a starter.

Fermentation is the art of a collecting things, shoving them into a favorable environment, and letting time do its thing.

As modern humans, we are given an illusion of control. However, choosing to ferment is a leap of faith, especially at the idiosyncratic home-brew level and especially in one’s first attempts.

But one should start simply, with the a basic sauerkraut. The first batch I made was with some almost-wilted purple cabbage that had been abandoned in the fridge. I chopped it up, squeezed the leaves as I added salt, shoved it all into a jar. A couple days later I had the best sauerkraut I’ve ever tasted in my life.

Absolute magic.

My sourdough starter is also magical, but it took two long weeks of feeding and discarding before she came to life. It then took another three weeks before I figured out how to bake properly to draw out her full capabilities.

In contrast, sauerkraut was so simple. Just two ingredients shoved into a jar for a couple days. Fermentation happens, and this book is a lovely mix of folksy wisdom, extensive experience, and authoritative research that wrestles with this unruly topic.

This book is an encyclopedic and magisterial work. I wonder what it’s like to work on such a project. Writing is a lonely task and any ambitious project is fraught with insecurity. With this grand title, it’s clear that Sandor Katz knew this was going to be his magnum opus. I also wonder how it feels when such a project achieves the author’s dreams of grandeur, winning a James Beard award and being generally regarded as a in instant classic in the field.

This book is victorious, but whatever brilliance earned from the previous project is fleeting. There’s always the next project. Life (and fermentation) marches on, and I look forward to reading Sandor’s newest book, Fermentation as Metaphor.

Postscript
I really like the following quote, but I couldn’t fit them into the post above.

Professor Kosikowski won over Kindstedt and his fellow graduate students. “He understood that traditional cheesemaking was not simply about food, or even gastronomic delight, but rather carried with it the weight of the culture and local identity that are so essential for providing context and meaning to our lives.” Indeed, all food exists in a broad context, and centralized mass produced food diminishes that context.

page 206

A few months ago I wanted to read some lighter fare, and it doesn’t get much lighter than an interior decoration guide.

However, a style guide that is half a century old has it’s own gravitas.

The anachronistic use of “Mr. and Mrs. John Doe” was a amusing and cringe worthy, and the author seemed overly fond of Marimekko cloth. But it was really quite intriguing to see the true variety of kitchens in this book. Not merely finishes, but substantive differences in arrangements, equipment, and shelving. I strongly suspect that the past five decades of mass standardization made our modern kitchens quite banal.

1970 doesn’t feel that long ago, but frankly, aside from some of the newest kitchens in the book, most of the photos felt completely foreign even though most of them were located in America. Unlike books and magazines today, the photographs were primarily black and white, which wasn’t ideal – except for the modernist kitchens (such as the one in our own house) that didn’t have much color.

Purist kitchens pay no homage to rusticity or prettiness. Uncompromisingly they use twentieth-century units and ingredients. They are inevitably spare of line, extremely well planned and easy to work in. This does not preclude color, but they are often pure white and beautifully detailed. Most purist kitchens are designed by architects – usually for themselves.

page 65

I picked up this book of the side of the road on trash day, and it is regrettable to think of what other books are being tossed out around town without second thought. Even though I wouldn’t have paid money to buy a copy, this book is now safe on my shelves.

I’ve always called myself politically liberal but temperamentally conservative. From his podcasts, I sensed that this brash business school professor had the same sentiments. He railed against the COVID stimulus bills prop up the wealthy while minimizing support to the folks who really need the help, and he never misses an opportunity to hammer our tech giants whenever they are stifling the wider economy.

Given the affinity, I was quite interested in this book but didn’t want to deal with the hassle of handling physical media in a COVID world. After breaking the e-book barrier with BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits, I returned to the Libby app and picked up a copy of the audiobook, narrated by Prof G, himself.

I had been avoiding books on tape because I’ve long felt that books require a certain level of concentration to properly appreciate. However, self help books are the junk food of non-fiction prose. With a run time of less than 4 hours this was barely a nice diversion from my usual slate of podcasts.

I was right.

This book is a nice easy listen. It feels like a compilation of blog articles that muse on the importance of hard work and developing meaningful relationships. It is a fragmented memoir focused on his upbringing, personal success and failings, and the joys of raising his boys. As an exercise in confirmation bias, it was a pleasant exercise to nod along with a nominally self aware, almost-obnoxious, rich, influential, white guy speaking truths I already believed.

The main thing is that I’ve now broken the ebook and audiobook barriers that had limited my intake of this sort non-fiction velvetta. Given everything available in the library catalog, it looks like I’ll be getting all the self help I can handle at 1.5x speed.

Atomic Habits is a survey of the best knowledge of habits; worthy of being perennially on hold at the library as an update to Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. I remember listening to Duhigg’s book a few years ago and feeling quite inspired about habits. Then nothing happened.

Unfortunately, both of these books are great at motivating one to pick up good habits, but neither is great at giving you concrete steps to get there.  

As alternative, I suggest BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits. Fogg has developed simple crystalline ideas (such as his B=MAP model) and paired it with his powerful Focus Mapping exercise. The power in Fogg’s book is rooted in his career long focus on behavior change. He is a primary source who is able to provide actionable advice from the first chapter onward – for personal, family, and business use. When he says the majority of popular literature on habit formation is incorrect, I trust him.  

Even though the publication dates are reversed, I would say that Fogg is the teacher, while Clear is the student. This is not intended to be an insult. While the master has myopically focused on the craft, the student is free to explore interlocking connections within the field. It was useful to read Atomic Habits as a refresher a few weeks after completing Tiny Habits. Getting a different author’s holistic perspective on the subject was a nice jolt to keep pursuing the practice.

I’m not saying the two books are in perfect alignment. For example,  Atomic Habits proposes a path of Identity > Behavior > Outcomes (similar to Sinek’s Start with Why).  Even though this “concentric ring” model isn’t directly addressed by in Tiny Habits, I think BJ Fogg would propose that one should start by modifying Behavior, which will then influence your Identity and Outcomes (Identity < Behavior > Outcomes).

However, the differences are minor, and they complement each other well. For example, I’m using both approaches to help me lose weight. I created a new food intake checklist that helps me track what I eat (a tiny habit at every meal), as well as regularly repeating a mantra “I enjoy hunger” to adjust my identity from someone used to rely on snacks all day.

Both are worth reading. Maybe you’ll prefer Atomic Habits. However, since action are more significant than words, I should note that I purchased a my own hardcopy of Tiny Habits, while I am content to merely compliment Atomic Habits.

Invisible Cities and Labyrinths have been close at hand ever since my Berkeley days, including a couple trips to China. But the dirty secret is that I’ve never completely read either book. I hadn’t gotten around to the non-fiction essays of Labyrinths, and my attempted read of Invisible Cities was waylaid by the deep sleep deprivation of studio. As a privileged knowledge worker comfortably hunkering down during the pandemic, I was fortunate to rectify both omissions over the past year.

I’m happy I did. I suspect the book endures as a classic because it is a lovely collection of prose poems that is perfectly suited for random sampling. Which is a fine practice, but such a habit misses the structure of this book.

The algorithm is nominally obvious from looking at the table of contents. Then again, reading a book by the TOC is knowing a City via its subway map. Calvino starts in Marco and Kublai’s dream world, slowly introduces anachronisms, bringing the reader into the present day (now delightfully patinaed from the vantage point of the 21st century), toys with darker themes, and leaves on a wistful note.

The flow is as rich as the individual pieces. The book is carefully ordered arrangement, and the reader is well served going covered to cover. My copy still sits next to the bed; unlike many of its compatriots who quickly return to the shelves, this one ain’t going nowhere.

I’ve written fondly about wisdom literature, however I’m not fond of books that just focus on the idea of “wisdom”.

These two books are more poetic than the Wisdom of Solomon, but all three are thin paeans to the concept of wisdom.

The Chinese books sell wisdom for the sake of a well ordered empire and emphasize balance and relationships.

This sales pitch is more appetizing than Solomon’s heavy handed appeal to a monotheistic god presenting naive choices between right and wrong.

But it’s all thin gruel.

Gotcha.

Wisdom good.

Where do go from here?

䷾䷛

Even so, a book that has survived the test of time to enter the canon of a great empire is most likely worth a download and quick read. Maybe you’ll catch something I missed.

In 2020, I started a system for my personal reading. I took five books to become my current reading list, put them next to the bed, and stashed the rest out sight.

Each of the five books satisfied a category:

1. Non-Fiction
2. Fiction
3. Spirituality
4. Self Help
5. Art

When I wrote the first draft of this post, the books on deck were:

• Mythologies, Roland Barthes
• Farewell My Lovely, Raymond Chandler
• Collected Writings of Epicurus
• Zen of Seeing by Fredrick Franck
• Jazz, Henri Matisse

The only book I haven’t completed is Epicurus.

In a world where there is so much information, it is important to simplify what is immediately available. Once resolved, you are free to just read within the preselected menu. If I lose interest in a book, I can either throw it off out of the favored circle (as I did with Epicurus) which frees you up to read other books within the category (I’ve read quite a few wisdom texts over the past couple months. Alternately, I can let a book marinate while I dive into other topics. If so, at least I’m avoiding other books within the same genre, which makes it easier to return to the lagging book.

This system makes it evident if I’ve been heavily pursuing one category over the others. I may or may not counteract against such a trend, but either way, it is good to be clear what is top of one’s mental interests.

This system has turned out to be a well rounded way to wrangle all the good books around me – unread, re-read, library loans, and newly purchased. I’d recommend giving it a shot if your “to read” pile has become intimidatingly tall.