Don’t know why I’ve never heard of David Sedaris but I caught a short segment on today’s This American Life and he is one funny guy. From an Amazon review: “He thwarts his North Carolina speech therapist (“for whom the word pen had two syllables”) by cleverly avoiding all words with s sounds, which reveal the lisp she sought to correct. His midget guitar teacher, Mister Mancini, is unaware that Sedaris doesn’t share his obsession with breasts, and sings “Light My Fire” all wrong–“as if he were a Webelo scout demanding a match.” As a remarkably unqualified teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sedaris had his class watch soap operas and assign “guessays” on what would happen in the next day’s episode.” I’ll read one of his books and report back.
Category Archives: Books
War & Peace
“Peace is best. You should make every sacrifice to secure peace. When you absolutely must go to war, however, you must try to kill all the enemy you can as quickly as you can, holding nothing back, until they have surrendered or you have been defeated utterly. It is a great fraud to think otherwise and it prolongs the agony. It would be better if people said, if we fight, we are going to boil babies in their own fat and blast the skin off nice old ladies, so they die slowly in great pain, and we are happy to do this, because what we fight for is so important. And if they conclude that it is not as important as that, then they should fight no more.”
— Robert K. Tanenbaum, Act of Revenge
Good ideas
“Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible.”
— Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. (pg 878)
Recently read.
The Vanished Man, by Jeffery Deaver (a Lincoln Rhyme novel); Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (What if Jesus Christ had a tryst with Mary Magdalene, and the interlude produced a child?); and Small Town by Lawrence Block.
King of Torts, Pattern Recognition, Altered Carbon
I would have sworn I mentioned these but can’t find any reference. John Grisham’s King of Torts was… predictable. And not very interesting. But I couldn’t put it down. Hmmm. I enjoyed William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition more than any of his recent books. And Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon was pretty damned good, despite similarity to early Gibson novels.
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
“In the 25th century, it’s difficult to die a final death. Humans are issued a cortical stack, implanted into their bodies, into which consciousness is “digitized” and from which -unless the stack is hopelessly damaged- their consciousness can be downloaded (“resleeved”) with its memory intact, into a new body.”
— Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
Pattern Recognition
Finished William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and enjoyed it as much as expected. With the characters and settings still in my head, it was strange to read (on Gibson’s blog) how real they are for the creator:
“One odd moment, sitting in the lower lobby of the SoHo Grand, Cayce’s entrance suddenly unspooled and I looked up, almost expecting her to walk in. And simultaneously reminded I don’t know what she looks like; she’s written “from inside”.
This means zip to anyone that has not read the book. Other nuggets that got some highlighter:
“Like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet.” (pg4)
“The future is there, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now. (pg57)
“Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films.” (pg67)
“Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out onthe web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free. It’s as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it every was.Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.” (pg68)
“History erased via the substitution of an identical object.” (pg194)
And my favorite…
“She is increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesn’t help solve them, but she hasn’t really found an alternative yet. Surely you can’t just leave them there.” (pg92)
What Should I Do with My Life?
I really liked Po Bronson’s first two novels, “The Nudist on the Late Shift” and “The First $20 Millions Is Always the Hardest.” And he’s written countless articles about technology, Silicon Valley, Dot-Com boom and bust. The title of his latest book, “What Should I Do with My Life?” almost turned me off. I’m not all that keen on non-fiction to begin with. But I really enjoyed this book. I found so many “take-aways”…but I’ll only give you a few:
When you’re passionate about what you do, time disappears.
People who don’t have passions don’t struggle.
Failure is hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you’re successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever. It is so much harder to leave a good thing.
Don’t pretend what you do doesn’t shape you.
People who love what they do are much more productive than those that are doing it for the paycheck. If we can find work we care about, our productivity will explode. Our value will increase radically. We will be the source of good ideas. And we will be rewarded.
“If you’re successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and opportunity can lock you in forever.” Or “if you don’t like The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question (What do you do?), maybe it’s partly because you don’t like your answer.”
My lips move when I read
I find that’s true when I’m reading almost anything by Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block or Robert B. Parker. I just love these guys and find myselt reading their dialogue aloud (but quietly). Just finished Elmore Leonard’s When the Women Come Out to Dance and working my way through Block’s Enough Rope. While I’ve never been all that found of short stories, I loved these collections. Alex Cross fans will have to read James Patterson’s Four Blind Mice but I thought it was disappointing. Robert B. Parker’s Spencer series suffers from the same formula-rot but Parker has given us Sunny Randall and she’s a nice change but just barely.
Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel
I’ve spent the last few minutes of the last few nights on my back laughing so hard tears trickled down to my ears. I’m highlighting my way through Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel by Scott Adams.
“You can ignore almost everything that is asked of you and in the long run it won’t matter. Either the tasks will become moot or your boss will forget what he asked you to do, or someone else will do it.” Or, “If you stall long enough, every corporate initiative ends, even layoffs.”
I particularly enjoyed the description an encounter with a salesman for a local radio station that was trying to convince Adams to buys advertising for the resturant he co-owns. Adams asked the sales person how many listeners the radio station had.
“The sales weasel explained, ‘You have to spend money to make money.’ I pointed out that he probably knew the number of listeners and that I could decide on my own if it was worth knowing. The weasel responded by explaining how many human beings lived within listening range of his station, i.e. weaselmath. I asked how that mattered if they weren’t actually listening, just potentially listening.”
“Then he explained that it’s much more expensive to advertise on other radio stations on a cost-per-relevlant-listener basis. I asked how he knew that if he didn’t know how many listeners he had.”
“He explained to me that some of my competitors were advertising on his station and they must be getting some benefit or they wouldn’t be doing it. I pointed out that most of my competitors weren’t advertising on his station and if not advertising wasn’t working, they wouldn’t be doing it. It wasn’t a good meeting.”
God help us if radio listening ever becomes as brutally measurable as the Web.