Matt E
“Why is this on your reading list?” you ask [in the version of the world where anybody gives a shit about what I read]. The answer is that this is a waypoint on a journey that started when I came across a throwaway comment in an essay that was along the lines of “business books—which are self help for men.” As a self-help addict, I was immediately interested into this window into the emotional world of the straight white male titans of industry during the growth period of 20th century corporate America, and all of the people that wanted to take their place.
The first insight that I gleaned from this book is that at some point Boomers were told better. This book is sexist as all get out—the only time women are mentioned in the book is as an example of a type of employee that costs more, due to the completely unsourced claim that women take more sick days—and it would probably be racist too if Drucker considered the possibility that non-white people could be knowledge workers too. But there's some great stuff in here, really practical ideas about how to come to decisions, how to acknowledge your own biases, how to seek out other perspectives. So, for what its worth, when you come across Baby Boomer myopia and pigheadedness, know that even the straightest, most businessy ones have been told better.
My second insight was just to marvel at what a sorry state American capitalism is, even when you take it on its own merits. The book is unwavering in its commitment to R&D, efficiency, and meeting production goals. It's difficult to see today's world of disruption, venture capital bubbles, and a landscape where the largest companies seem to not need to make a profit represented anywhere in Druckers book. There's something comforting in the corporate world he describes, a world where you grow your business by being better and smarter than your competitors.
This is a very Michael Pollan book (how auspicious that someone that writes so well about plants has such a homophone for a last name!). He can't help but write in his own voice, as if he would want to. What that means is that he will charm you with his passion for interweaving natural and human history, often to great effect. For example, he has sections on the Judeo-Christian suppression of psychoactive plants and herbal medicines that works itself into a righteous outrage. There are little gems like that sprinkled through: wild apples in Central Asia, the contrast between bright saturated tulips and monochromatic grey Calvinist Netherlands.
On the other hand, it means that you're in for a lot of mellow Northern-California patrician baby boomer...uh...insight. If that's something that turns you off, you're going to hate this book. Me? I kind of like the boomer duo of counterculture hangover and unselfsonsciously narrow points of reference, so I enjoyed his genial narration.
The parts add up to slightly less than its sum...this is more like a collection of essays on four plants, but if you're interested in natural history, foodways, botany, or interdisciplinary environmental science, have at it. Anyone else can give it a skip.
There's this thread that runs through a lot of different subjects: fitness, marketing, learning, cleaning, etc. If I was to boil it down, it would be: just do it (and do matters much more than it).
The version of that thread runs throughout Peak is a little bit different. It goes: You can't practice without paying attention. If you're having fun you're probably not growing as fast as you could. You can develop almost any skill you want to a high degree. Whatever your excuse is, it's probably bullshit.
If that's a message you need convincing of, this is a great book to do it. If you've been primed by other books like Growth Mindset or The Power of Habit that explore similar territory, you might not need to read the whole thing. Either way, there's a good 20-30 pages that break down the conceptual pieces of how to practice deliberately and in a way that leads to fast growth, and I found that really useful. Your mileage may vary, but if you think you might be interested in this, you probably will be.
I'm not sure what I read, but I loved it. Was it fantasy, sci-fi, a detective story? A metaphor for class, for truth and fiction? Who cares, it's all good.
In my opinion, one of the most skillful uses of beginning in media res to build curiosity and epiphany as the reader slowly discovers elements of this world that all of the characters find too obvious to comment on.
I loved this biography. Swaffords style is slightly arch and witty, while also being generous to his subject. He's a very genial guide to Beethoven's extraordinary life, and the insights he brings as a composer made me hear things in a different way.
It's a very strange thing to fall into a deeply human agape love with someone long dead.
Full disclosure: this book was written for me. Academic setting + comedy of manners + a healthy serving of perversion + biting wit + earthy/salacious/weirdly yeasty sex scenes = the exact type of highbrow trash that I love. Think Pedro Almodovar without a murder or plastic surgery.
At the end of the day, it's a shaggy dog story that ends in the oldest punchline in the book, the...
(I don't want to do all the work for you)
Reading this book was a bit like meeting a really cool new friend for the first time at their going away party. I enjoyed it well enough, but there was a certain amount of disengagement from it that I felt because the timing just isn't right. I can think of many dark nights of the soul where McNiff's gentle but unshakable belief in our human capacity to create would have been the right thing, and I'm certain there will be more of those in the future.
And let me take a moment to admire how good this book is in the context of what it doesn't try to be. It doesn't try to be a method. It doesn't try to be a step by step guide. It doesn't pretend to be anything other than what McNiff has learned from his years of practice. It has structure, but it's not interested in any strong sense of direction or endpoint. Any chapter could be read in any order, and it is highly quotable and remixable, down to the paragraph.
What it is is a quiet reminder that creativity is exploration, respect, and deep engagement, and we have almost infinite directions we can go at any point. LaMonte Young's Variations 1960 instructed the performer to “draw a straight line and follow it.” Sister Corita Kent advised her art students to “find a place you trust and try trusting it for a while.” Well, sometimes you follow that line and you get very far away indeed, and sometimes you trust places and then you don't trust them anymore, or at least you get that itchy feeling that maybe its time to gather your bindle and move down the road. Trust The Process reminds us that an infinite number of straight lines runs through any point, and if you're stuck in place, the best thing to do is to take a step.
I reread The Count of Monte Cristo every couple of years. It is my favorite book. Whatever you want–a love story, pirates, bandits, social satire, a twisty plot—is all here. Every time I read it, it seems like something new comes to the surface.
In the shadow of the Trump election, I couldn't help but think about the way that Monte Cristo (Edmond Dantes) is basically a superhero of the Enlightenment. He accomplishes things that small minded, superstitious people cannot conceive of because he has unlimited amounts of the two resources of Enlightenment (and therefore the emerging global regime of capitalism): scientific knowledge and money.
Right now, we may be looking at the end of the Enlightenment project, or conversely the rebirth of it. Enlightenment virtues of progress over tradition, knowledge over dogma, curiosity over taboo, cosmopolitanism over parochialism, are all headed toward a moment where they must be defended or abandoned.
Even Monte Cristo has his limits. His progressivism did not overcome patriarchal tradition, and as elsewhere in Western culture, scientific knowledge is used by the Count to reinforce existing prejudices against undesirables. In the end, money does not triumph over death, and knowledge does not heal wounds.
Dumas was the first master of escapist fiction. The novel stands, but what we escape from seems to be shifting radically.
Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty is a title that is designed to grab me, specifically me. It also has a couple subtle pieces of misdirection in it. “Every song ever” and “musical plenty” seem to be talking about the endless Spotify playlist that we all listen to, music from every land and age becoming ever more accessible. “Ways to listen” to music that can accommodate this wide open world seems like rich territory to explore. I was looking forward to a master writer introduce some new ways of breaking down and listening, some new ways to explore.
That's certainly part of Ratliff's project, but it very quickly becomes clear that Ratliff thinks that any grand systems of taxonomy or replacements for the genre markers that once guided record buyers in a Sam Goody's are doomed to fail. His twenty ways of listening are not the only twenty ways of listening, not even the best twenty ways of listening. Just twenty of his ways of listening. If we accept this, than the project of the book becomes more modest. We're not thinking of new taxonomies at all, merely observing that there are techniques and spirits that animate music that manifest differently across musical traditions, and an open listener has it in their power to appreciate music in this new way.
Which, by the way, is not that different from the old way. Ratliff makes the implicit argument that genre as a system of classification is tied to the mid-20th century record industry and should be thought of as a historical anomaly. If this is so, as I think it is, what came before? Every Song Ever is an exercise in the tradition building written about by T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Artist:”
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
A confession: this is the first book so far that I've marked as “read” without finishing. It's not like there aren't going to be more books or more things to say, and if I was a better person I would just move on and not worry about getting credit or social media points.
However.
I found this book so tedious that I want credit for every minute I spent with it. I heard on a podcast this week that the apex of the literary experience sitting down silently with an object as the writer's inner sensibility melds with the reader's imagination. This book did not reach those heights. In fact, I thought it was more like a boring person telling a boring story, say, Kristen Stewart describing the traffic she hit on the way to the post office.
I don't want to pile on, negativity is just too easy. But I really didn't like this book, and would not recommend it.
What a strange, contentious little book! I must own up to the baggage I brought to it. On one hand was contemptuous dismissal by some highly intelligent, educated people in my life (perhaps coincidentally, they were also dull and without poetry). On the other hand were some of my heroes of radical individuality, Brene Brown, Krista Tippett, Elizabeth Gilbert, that seemed to revere Cohelo and this book. What was I going to think?
I think that a half allegory is a difficult thing to love. Why bring in religious language when Cohelo seems to believe that the forces of destiny he writes about are beyond religion? Why engage with Orientalist fantasies of warring tribes, bandits at the pyramids, fertile oases, if they ultimately do not carry meaning? With this eye, The Alchemist is too long, and not a short book after all.
Maybe I can be this jaded because the message of fearless self-actualization that Cohelo preaches has permeated into the culture. I'm just not sure that this is going to melt the heart of a cynic any longer, if it ever did.
One small minded quibble: for a book that paints its story with such a broad brush, has there ever been such a tin-eared phrase as “personal legend”? I can't decide if Cohelo was deliberately writing around the word destiny, or whether it's just a clumsy translation from the Portuguese.
The experience of reading this book was both completely enlightening and completely maddening.
Let's talk about the good first. I've never learned much about classical rhetoric, so it was kind of a revelation to get such a quick introduction to some of the analytical vocabulary of phrasing. I'd never really understood why the study of music was part of rhetoric in classical education, and this book opened up the similarities between some speech devices and the small details of melodies and progressions.
The bad is that Forsyth uses an extremely regular structure, where a hybrid phrase is used as both the last example in a chapter and the first example of the next. This is clever the first time, and increasingly monotonous as the book goes on.
The ugly...ugly? Maybe that's too harsh. A warning: Forsyth adopts a tone that is somewhat playful and irreverent, part mockingly self serious. I appreciate the attempts to include a fairly catholic assortment of examples from both high and low culture. This hipness by being too cool to care about being hip backfires as often as it lands, giving the impression of, as a New Yorker writer said of Malcolm Gladwell, “a young person's idea of an old person.”
If you love language, and aren't turned off by ironic mansplaining, I highly recommend it.
I thought this was a truly excellent work of speculative fiction that both took its time with what ifs and remained grounded in reality and real motivations. Winters writes about the poison of compromise with real insight. The compromises our country has made with white supremacy after all, are just different terms than the ones explored in Underground Airlines. I'm looking forward to reading Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad soon.
Reading Habibi is like watching Craig Thompson juggle with chainsaws. The huge ideas he works with: the intractable divisions of gender, sex, ecology, religion, and colorism, are live and dangerous and complicated. He chose to set this story in a dreamlike world outside of time and concrete geography, and it frees him to explore these divisions as aspects of the human condition.
There are no easy answers found in this story, grey area is everywhere and anyone looking for relief or prescriptions is bound to be disappointed. Except maybe in the values of story and art. Story, art, words and ink are intwined, and I have to note as well that I cannot think of a more beautiful object than the book that is and contains this story.
The dedication to Night Sky With Exit Wounds reads: “for my mother [& father]” and the brackets between love for mother and love for father is one of the strongest threads in the weave of this collection of poetry. Ocean (I use his first name because I feel like I know him now and I've already fallen in love with his author photo & it's a beautiful name too) writes sharply about the deep unembraceable hunger for love and touch and wanting that comes with a father that hits your mother and hugs you with liquor on his breath and scares you with his weapons and his physicality. But he also has that poets eye, compassionate and cosmic, that sees his father as the survivor of a terrible war and a terrible time.
Sexuality is ever present and always questioned with suspicion in these poems. Straight women worry about becoming their mother in their relationships. Straight men worry about whether they are becoming their fathers. Gay men worry about whether they are their mother who sublimates her self for a man or their father who possesses another (not all straight relationships are like this, but I don't see the value in pretending like most are not).
Mixed race and immigrant children take the hard work of coexistence and assimilation into their bodies. The political status of your people are the winds that can blow self-esteem and security away. When I'm with white people, I say that I'm Mexican-American. When I'm with Latinos, I say nothing at all, because the real truth of it is that my home culture is neither Mexican nor American, it is the negotiated culture of my parent's marriage.
The cover photo is of Ocean as a young boy seated between two women. On his shirt is written—I gasped out loud when I made out the faded words—”I Love Daddy.” White bars with the title and author hide their eyes, echoing documents censored by the military, but also maybe protecting the people in the photos from being completely seen. You can still make out the scared expression on the little boy's face.
Building Stories contains in its large cardboard box (260 pages and 14 easy to misplace accessories, as the Library of Congress catalog entry describes it) a reading experience that is so unique that even formulating a response requires some extra thinking.
If you're not familiar, Building Stories consists of a stiff food out cardboard diagram, like a game board, and 14 story elements ranging in size from a simple paper comic strip to a newspaper broadsheet, and ranging in concept from a straightforward graphic novel to a strange beehive daily newspaper. There is no prescribed order to the experience, which spans over 200 years of time and principally concerns the residents of an apartment building in Chicago.
In high school, I was browsing our school library's (pathetic, and even more so in hindsight) fiction section, and came across Julio Córtazar's Hopscotch. Unfortunately, at that time I barely knew how to read and didn't know anything. I remember reading a section or two, completely baffled, and giving up. That seed planted a love of text and story games in me forever.
As with a well constructed chance story, the sequence I chose to read Building Stories in was perfect. The story probes time, serendipity, loneliness, and most especially the way that humans almost never know what kind of story they are in while they are living it. If I have any criticism of the story, I did think that the emotional tone of the stories was too unremittingly bleak. Maybe that's the criticism of an optimist or a romantic (I'm afraid that I might be both) but it also took away surprise as every story ended in a moment of alienation and loneliness.
Read it! I want to meet the other 87 billion versions of me that chose to read it differently. Chris Ware has created something remarkable.
Wow.
I will be thinking about the bold ideas in this book for days and months and years.
Reading the opening sections of the book as Lewis lays out his concepts of gift exchange, market exchange, the way that they parallel logos and eros, and the exploitation and life draining that can happen when different modes of exchange are used inappropriately electrified me. It was like finding out the proper name to a geographic feature that you have always known, but did not know this history of. There are ideas I read that have been deeply held in my being without being able to recognize their name or their logic.
I did not follow most of the critical writing on Whitman and Pound.
It's also made me think a lot about the futility of wishing for a context and time that is more friendly to art, and the importance of finding the new structures to support and patronize art in the present. Like with a person, there is usually less of a point to wishing they were different than the hard work of finding a way to coexist with them.
What did I think? That's almost the wrong question. What did I feel seems like a better question. I feel tired and empty. This book was written, this book was published, the whole public conversation about this book has been completed and moved on from but wounds keep getting inflicted, new rending in the fabric of our sense of national selfhood. I have been reading Coates for nearly 10 years, and even the darkest of his writings in those years did not prepare me for the bleakness of the ending of this book.
It's my greatest hope that one day we will be able to read this as a cry of despair from a very poisonous moment in history, but I am a lot more hopeful than Ta-Nehisi Coates and I have nothing to stand upon except a faith in beauty and light.