Marcus

Ugh. How many times can you put someone in an impossible situation and still have it be funny or witty? For the first 50 or 75 pages I thought the famous catch 22 dilemmas were clever and illustrative of the futility of war, the quirkiness of the human condition etc. After another 100 pages of the same thing over and over ad nauseam, I found myself alternating between frustrated and bored. Finally I stopped reading it 3/4ths of the way in–the occasional laugh couldn't make up for the repetitive sarcasm, depressing futility and dry plot. I read on Wikipedia that originally Heller was going to make it novelette. Maybe he should have.

Great story almost ruined by terrible writing. Despite the flaws in the writing, the story did manage to peek through and it was interesting and inspirational.

My Kindle was lying under a thin layer of dust on a set of metal Ikea Helmer drawers. The cream drawers were next to my bed and sat on small plastic casters. I reached for it. The drawers rolled slightly as I bumped them with my elbow in my clumsy attempt to grab the device without sitting up. The improvised night stand was not new and was heavy with pens and books and tools and various items that I had filled it with over the years. Still, the force of my arm hitting it was enough to cause it to move. Until this moment it was situated parallel to my bed, now it was not. I did not bother to move the drawers back after I had the Kindle in my hand. It was dusk and the sun was more red than usual causing the cream to appear pink, but my thoughts were not focused on the sun or on the evening. I was thinking about reading a book. I was interested in starting something new despite having recently started many other books that were good, any one of which I could have picked up and finished without needing to make the effort of finding a new book to read. I pushed the button on the bottom of the electronic reader. Nothing happened. I pushed it again. This time the screen flickered once, then twice, and a third time as the monochromatic advertisement for a romance novel featuring a shirtless man holding a busty woman leaning back in his arms was replaced by the text of the last book I read. The book was about consciousness and its origins. Last time I read I felt motivated to read something difficult and scientific. On this evening, I wanted to read something that would make me feel something more, something to bring back the emotion I felt as a child reading Old Yeller or A Wrinkle in Time. I pressed the embossed button on the front of the Kindle to return to the list of books the device contained. I did not want to read about consciousness or to think of it at all. I was alive and conscious. That was enough. In the future I would not be conscious or alive but as for now, I was. I wanted to start a book I could read that would require minimal effort and yet hold my attention while at the same time being at least somewhat literary. Also, I wanted to read something that would make me feel more. I jabbed at the screen with my left index finger to replace the initial list of titles which were displayed in the order they were added. None of them appealed to me. After three more swipes of my finger, the list of books showed the title of a book that I had recently seen reviewed by someone called Manny whose review of the book I enjoyed reading. I knew that if I was going to eventually write a review myself that I would need to read the book. I tapped the book and after the customary flickers of the screen, the text of My Struggle appeared and I began reading about the heart and about death. I immediately knew that it was a book that I would finish. It was just the book for that night. I was happy about that.

This book should have been 100 pages long. I made it through 150 and I feel like I know the whole story. Twice. The amazing events are almost destroyed by non-stop breathless writing. Breathless is good, but man. Breathless for 100 pages in a row is just exhausting.

This is the first full book I've read in French, so.. yay for that. The plot is insane. I'm glad it was so engaging because otherwise reading it in French would have probably been too difficult and I'd have given up. As it was, I sometimes found myself annoyed that I had to slow down to look words up, but other times it felt like the words were jumping off the page. I'd look up any number of words to make sure I understood exactly what was happening and to keep progressing.

Stylistically though, it's... pretty bad. Normally I might not even comment on that, but for a book with a character that alludes to Nabokov (his Lola is Dicker's Nola) and sometimes even tries to playfully imitate Nabokov (N.O.L.A.), you just can't miss on style. To use a sports metaphor, if you want to play in the big leagues, you better bring your A game. Sometimes the prose had me rolling my eyes. It's not as stock as say, Stephen King, (yes, I did go there), but it can be pretty tough to ignore sometimes.

That said, don't skip it. Don't read it for style, but read it. The story is fantastic.

Well, my timing was great on this one. I started it just a couple days before the whole project PRISM scandal, if you can call something so endemic a scandal. Cypherpunks predicts and warns against exactly this type of destruction of privacy by governments in the name of the “four horsemen of the infocalypse” (terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, and organized crime). While on one hand, those things are unarguably bad, what is the correct response and solution to them? Is it the complete forfeiture of privacy by all, innocent, suspected and guilty alike?

The discussion in the book is good, but it's poorly organized and sometimes too informal and repetitive.

This was a pretty good, quick bio of Mozart. It definitely didn't glorify him. Beyond his musical genius he was portrayed as a pretty normal guy–irresponsible with money, a bit of a philanderer and amused (perhaps more than the normal guy) with body humor.

I thought Frankenstein was a pretty good story. It was sort of scary, and had some good semi-morbid explorations of loneliness and depravity. The creature though, just didn't seem consistent, even for a monster. One moment he's lofty and moral, the next he's burning down houses and murdering in cold blood. Victor Frankenstein, “Frankenstein's” creator, was whiny and full of excuses and wasn't much of a man. His line is always that of the “how entirely I am innocent” victim. Everything seemed to take him by surprise and there were a few too many convenient coincidences. The descriptions are full and haunting; the dialog, on the other hand, reminded me of the dialog in [b:The Odyssey 3568959 La Odisea Homer http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg 3356006]. Everything anyone said seemed to be only to give advice or to moralize. It was repetitive, always explicit rather than subtle, overly formal and often trite. In [b:The Odyssey 3568959 La Odisea Homer http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg 3356006] that style was charming and poetic, in [b:Frankenstein 1582316 Frankenstein Mary Shelley http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Q2MBD97XL.SL75.jpg 4836639] it feels tired. I don't know if this is the best example, but here's one:“We do also, unfortunately,” replied my father, “for indeed I had rather have been for ever ignorant than have discovered so much depravity and ungratitude in one I valued so highly.”“My dear father, you are mistaken; Justine is innocent.”“If she is, God forbid that she should suffer as guilty. She is to be tried today, and I hope, I sincerely hope, that she will be acquitted.”After all that though, any criticism I could possibly have of this book is immediately negated by the fact that Shelly finished it when she was 19 years old. She wasn't entirely created in a vacuum, she vacationed with [a:Lord Byron 44407 George Gordon Byron http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1204920236p2/44407.jpg] and her dad was [a:William Godwin 113910 William Godwin http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg], both major literary forces. Still, when I compare her with myself at age 18, the humble product of the Jacksonville, FL public education system whose main skills barely extended beyond a darwinistic struggle for survival and whose mental faculties had scarcely contemplated the higher arts versus her, a talented observer of the world and of humanity, better read than I am even now, and possessed of a creative mind that has sent chills down millions of spines, I have to give her the mad props she deserves.

Just to be clear, this is not a book of self-help. If anything, it's a memento mori. Read it, be depressed about your imminent demise, then go out into the world and do something positive about it.

If you love science more than fiction, this will be right up your alley.

Good manifesto on making better art, ignoring the haters and finding your tribe.

Billy Budd adds to the evidence in Moby Dick that Melville was a master of the English language and a master of all things nautical. It's a great, short tale of good, evil and the sometimes harrowing injustice of circumstance. It was fascinating to see in Melville's last work, the dramatic difference in his earlier writing and the style of Billy Budd. For example, comparing two completely random sentences, first from Typee:

In the course of a few days Toby had recovered from the effects of his adventure with the Happar warriors; the wound on his head rapidly healing under the vegetable treatment of the good Tinor.

Billy Budd

Nevertheless, to anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without being inappreciative of the Past, it may be forgiven, if to such an one the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson's Victory, seems to float there, not alone as the decaying monument of a fame incorruptible, but also as a poetic reproach, softened by its picturesqueness, to the Monitors and yet mightier hulls of the European ironclads.

A Digression

Billy Budd

Lord of the Flies

Billy Budd

Billy Budd

Billy Budd

Billy Budd

There were parts of this book that I really liked, like the last 200 - 300 pages. The rest of it was so mixed that I almost gave up on it about 10 times. It took a long, long time to get going (about 200 pages) and after that most of the magic seemed almost completely unrelated to the plot, the descriptions were long and rambling, the jokes fell flat and the plot seemed to be unnecessarily complicated. There were too many pointless and disruptive footnotes and I found my mind wandering for large chunks then coming back to find that I hadn't really missed anything that mattered. Sometimes I like books like this, sometimes the tangents are fun and entertaining, in this book, not so much.

The ending, however, was great. I was completely absorbed for the last fourth of the book and it made me glad I stuck with it. I think Susanna Clarke has potential to be a great writer–her overall style and the breadth of her knowledge was awesome, but this book felt like it needed some major editing before I'd call it great.

How can one man understand so much about human nature and portray it so vividly and so beautifully? Tolstoy seems to have lived a thousand lives. Whether he is telling the thoughts of a mother as she gives birth, the reasonings of a man who is trying to find meaning in the conflicting worlds of science and religion, the anxious feelings of young lovers or, amusingly, the thoughts of a dog as it runs through the woods chasing birds in a hunt, the descriptions flow so effortlessly and incisively that I found myself laughing and crying and with goosebumps over and over as I read.

There is never a sense of hurry in the story–that the best way to read it was to enjoy the prose and let the plot unfold in its slow, meandering way without expecting it or anticipating it. It's a book that should be enjoyed with leisure and pondered over time.

This is a fantastic tale of a wild exploration through Africa. Heinrich Barth was a man's man, he was letters, arts and science personified. He wasn't without flaws, but he was clever, rugged and relentless. Perhaps most admirable is that he managed to do what most people never can and he took everyone he met on their own merits.

Kemper detracts from it a little from the journey with his frequent need to editorialize on the political correctness and supposed motives of the various characters in the book, but A Labyrinth of Kingdoms is very much worth reading despite that. The work of whittling 5 long volumes down to one book is pretty impressively done and Kemper does a pretty good job of incorporating sources outside the journals to give the big picture.

Very engaging. The stories of how St. Petersburg, Bombay, Dubai and Shanghai came to be what they are today are complex. At times they're inspirational, a testament to the power that one person's vision can have to influence a huge number of people, but just as often, the history of these cities are cautionary tales of what happens when idealism trumps pragmatism and power is concentrated too narrowly.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is my favorite so far in the Chronicles of Narnia series. I read it out loud to 7 year old Max and he, I think, feels it the same way, though perhaps for different reasons. To me, the writing is more polished, the plot more focused and engaging and the characters are more real in this book than in the previous four Narnia stories. I also really enjoy adventure stories and this is a great one. Max enjoyed it because he thinks Reepicheep, a 2 foot tall, utterly fearless talking mouse, is hilarious and for Max, hilarity is the main criteria for a good book.

My only minor complaint is that I think there' maybe a little too much Aslan ex machina (though not as much as in the previous 4 books). Even so, there's not so much magic as to make the story too fantastic to be enjoyable.

No review, just one quote about children from the essay “Nature”: Read it, it's kind of funny.

The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a gingerbread-dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame by all these attitudes and exertions,— an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this opaline lustre plays round the top of every toy to his eye to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.

I'll write a full review after I've had a little time to digest it, but this book was a wonderful way to start the year. Taleb's writing is so full of beginnings and iconoclastic ideas that it'll take some time to sort it out and follow the leads. It'll be fun give it a go though.

The Antidote starts off by talking about the positive thinking movement, moves on to Seneca and the Stoics then dips into Buddhist meditation, pauses to to criticize goal setting then stops in for a visit with Eckhart Tolle. Burkeman then writes about how we overvalue safety and undervalue failure then ends with a chapter on how we approach death, including an interesting visit to Mexico on the Day of the Dead.

Every chapter is well written and provides sufficient insight into each of the various subjects the book touches on. In the end, it's all pulled together nicely and makes a good case for finding peace and happiness by focusing on being okay with life as it is rather than constantly worrying about what it could be or should be. It's a good introduction to alternatives to positive thinking, but The Antidote never goes deep enough into any one subject to make it a memorable book or one that is worth re-reading.

Also...the cover endorsement “elegant and erudite” by Jonah Lehrer is unfortunate.

[added 7/2013]The fact that almost every 4 or 5 star review is full of guidelines on how to approach this book (“don't compare it to Harry Potter,” “don't expect a plot or likable characters or magic” etc., etc.) is evidence enough to show that it doesn't stand on its own merits. If it was any good, everyone wouldn't feel compelled to make excuses for it.[/]

Is this really what the brilliant mind behind Harry Potter comes up with? Petty small town politics, gossip and soap opera-like romance? What a disappointment. There are moments of brilliance in the writing, but it doesn't make up for the almost complete lack of humor, poignancy or even a single likable character. The Casual Vacancy is unnecessarily foul, overly pessimistic and just not worth the time it takes to read.

I wish Rowling would have been more ambitious. The plot could have been more expansive–bigger than a couple small towns. She could have chosen to do something more literary, The Casual Vacancy more than a few times feels closer to the genre of books by authors who release new titles every 3 months. She also could have chosen to simply be more creative instead of trying to be another Franzen or Duncan (both good in their own spheres, but this is J.K. Rowling we're talking about!). We know she's got it in her. Instead, this book feels like it is trying so hard to be for adults that it just ends up being boring. It's also a shame so many kids who grew up reading Harry Potter will be bombarded with an onslaught of profanity and vulgarity when they now, as young adults, see what their favorite author is up to.

On a more pedantic note, I had both the audio and digital versions and found several discrepancies between them, entire paragraphs, for example, missing in the digital version that are present in the audio version. Odd. You'd think that a book this big and anticipated would be perfectly presented.

I like this book because it's about a big, old, dark house in downtown Mexico City. I've never been to Mexico City, but I've been in big old houses in other Mexican towns, and this is the perfect story for bringing back their peeling paint, hard tile floors, high ceilings, scarce light and lost in time aura.

The three main characters are a mysterious and beautiful young girl, the Mexican version of Mrs. Havisham and a young male student. Mix them all up with some magical realism, time distortion and seriously whack relationships and you're left with Aura.

Here are a couple passages from the book, in Spanish.

This is the basically the same conversation that Robert Jordan has with María at the end of For Whom The Bell Tolls. Let's just say it works out a lot better for Jordan than it does for Felipe Montero in Aura:

—¿Me querrás siempre?
—Siempre, Aura, te amare para siempre.
—¿ Siempre? ¿Me lo juras?
—Te lo juro.
—¿Aunque envejezca? ¿Aunque pierda mi belleza? ¿Aunque tenga el pelo blanco?
—Siempre, mi amor, siempre.
—¿Aunque muera, Felipe? ¿Me amaras siempre, aunque muera?
—Siempre, siempre. Te lo juro. Nadie puede separarme de ti.

Tocas en vano con esa manija, esa cabeza de perro en cobre, gastada, sin relieves: semejante a la cabeza de un feto canino en los museos de ciencias naturales. Imaginas que el perro te sonríe y sueltas su contacto helado. La puerta cede al empuje levísimo, de tus dedos, y antes de entrar miras por ultima vez sobre tu hombro, frunces el ceño porque la larga fila detenida de camiones y autos gruñe, pita, suelta el humo insano de su prisa. Tratas, inútilmente de retener una sola imagen de ese mundo exterior indiferenciado.

Platform is a good book to get you up to speed with how to blog and build an online presence. Most of what's here is very basic, with occasional insights that make reading it worth it to people who have been around a bit. It's not so much that there is any major aha moment, but there are some tips on how to determine post length, handle guest posts, post frequency, post title. How to get started on Twitter and maybe even get a few followers. How to keep your personal brand coherent across the various social media sites. etc.

I should say that I started this expecting a book on how to build a product that becomes a platform. Clearly that is not what this book is about. If someone has a recommendation for a book about building software platforms, I'd love to hear about it.

Somewhere there is a real argument against technological solutionism, but it's not here. This is a shallow rant against nothing real because everything Morozov hates he either intentionally misrepresents or grossly misunderstands. Open to almost any page and you'll realize that almost no effort was made to understand the reality of, or motivations behind the “problems” at which he directs his self-righteous indignation.

Try The Shallows by Nick Carr for a better, more thoughtful approach to the problems of the Internet and technology.

This is a raw dump of the notes I took while reading the book:

Intro and Part 1

Regaining motivation
Remember the moment when you knew music would be a part of your life. Are there songs that bring that back?
Find the “unshakable confidence in your musicality”
“Passion, confidence and vulnerability are evidence of musical talent”
Are you repeating passages in your practice out of desperation to gain “technical security”? This can “destroy inspiration”
“the qualities of openness, uncertainty, freedom, and aliveness that characterize performing permeate practicing”

“One of the greatest challenges of making music is to maintain some cool in the heat of our passion and joy. It is easy to become impatient when it takes us longer to learn a beautiful piece than we would like. We ache to get it in our fingers, our voice, our body, to make physical contact with the music we love. This longing is our greatest asset. It is our communicative energy. It is the raw, throbbing energy of the heart.”

The difference between that longing and ambition. Ambition can cause us to drive ourselves too hard. “Struggle does not produce beautiful music”

What causes tension when practicing? Struggle?
- Trying to play too fast
- Trying to get perfect tone when you're just learning.
- Trying to force a “special kind of energy.” To force the emotion of the piece
- Practicing through physical pain. Use the pain as a “signal to relax or slow down.”

“The value of an exercise depends on your state of mind. If you don't find it interesting, then it is not useful.”

“Practicing exercises you don't enjoy is confining and saps your energy, whereas practicing a difficult but beautiful piece of music gives you energy”

Rather than playing perfectly X times in a row, try “practice performing for people and to become accustomed to making mistakes.” People are human, they make mistakes “Being note-perfect” is not the point, “making music involves a lot more than that.”

On practicing pieces you don't like as much:
“If you try to be receptive to a piece you don't love, you can expand your emotional range and grow as a musician.”


Part 2

1. Stretch

2. Settle down in your environment
    - Be present
    - Posture (upright, feet on floor etc.)
    - Breathing - notice the breath
    - Notice the environment around you. Feet on floor etc.
    - Consider meditation

3. Tune into your heart - “When you reflect on the impermanence of life, you feel the heart area of your chest open up—it feels warm. Once the heart is open, it is available for whatever activity you engage in. The warmth quickly floods your system. Your body feels more relaxed and fluid inside, and your movements become more gentle and precise. The energy of your heart fuels your actions.”
   - Appreciate your environment

4. Use your body in a comfortable and natural way - sit upright, don't lean and sway (watch the best instrument players, a lot of them look like trees) “all the leaning and swaying I used to do was a way of struggling against the music, that instead of letting it flow freely through my body, I had been trying to keep a grip on it, to force it to go a certain way.”
   - Try playing in front of a mirror to get awareness of posture
   - Take frequent practice breaks - 10 - 15 min every 45 (as if anyone is going to have that long to practice...)
   - Imagine yourself without your instrument, would you be positioned unnaturally?
   - Being emotionally intense is not the same as being physically tense

5. Follow your curiosity as you practice
    - Combatting resistance: “See if anything arouses your curiosity. It can be something as simple as how your hands feel that day. Try placing them on the instrument. Notice how they feel. Play one note or a few notes. See what each movement feels like. By relaxing with your resistance, you can gently break it down.”
    - On using a metronome: “Natural rhythm comes from being physically settled, mentally relaxed, and emotionally unrepressed. The first thing you can do for your sense of rhythm is to let yourself be, to let your breathing and your body settle down before you practice.”

6. Recognize three styles of struggle
    - 1 - “Overstated passion in which we cling to the music”
    - 2 - “Avoidance in which we resist dealing with the music”
    - 3 - “Aggression in which we attack the music”

7. Drop your attitudes and be simple - “when we drop our guard and are just ourselves, we reveal a deep humanness and gentleness that connect us to humanity, and the music we make is uplifting.”

8. Apply three listening techniques
    - 1 Sing the notes and lines
    - 2 Place your attention on the vibrations. Play very slowly.
    - 3 Place your attention on each sound as it resonates in the space around you. Music as meditation.

9. Organize notes into groups, phrases and textures.

10. Place your attention on the sensations of touch and movement. Basically, imagine that you are blind. Your eyes shouldn't be what tells you where to put your hands and fingers.

Part 3
- Playing from memory / by heart