Marcus
This book is similar to an Ayn Rand novel in that the philosophy is the most important aspect of the story. It makes for one dimensional characters that are highly predictable and a story line that is relatively linear. Still, I'm giving it four stars because once you've accepted the fact that you're not going to get a great story in the traditional sense, It's easy to appreciate that the case Eggers is making against ubiquitous technological connectedness is quite compelling.
If you are religious, or ever have been, read this book. It's the story of a pentecostal family and their relationship with our good friend Human Nature. The conflict between onset righteousness brought on by experiences of religious euphoria and our tendency to act on our base desires is richly and fairly represented on both sides of the spectrum. The fluid way the story spans places and generations and the biblical rhythm it's in told in draws you in and holds your attention. It is layered enough to easily merit re-reading.
I see the appeal to this book. Youthful exuberance, a lust for life, the excitement of finding “it” in conversation and music. The freedom of the road and life expanding as wide as the American countryside, ready to be consumed and explored. The pseudo spiritual, all-accepting opening up to experiencing fully whatever comes and not giving a damn about what happens tomorrow. The desire to define your new rules for life while willfully breaking all the old ones. On the Road has its moments of contagious transcendence.
And yet, it remains a story about a bunch of aimless kids recklessly ripping back and forth across the country leaving a trail of missing property, misplaced trust, broken hearts and ruined lives in their wake. It's told in an unrepentant way that sacrifices social responsibility at the alter of youthful pleasures. Despite Kerouac's portrayal of this dichotomy, life doesn't have to be that way. Freedom and virtue aren't mutually exclusive. Let On the Road wake you up and get you out the door. Enjoy the story, appreciate its place in American history. Then put Kerouac the shelf and head out in search of a more substantive guide to take along the way.
The last book I read was Kerouac's On the Road. I ended my review by saying that it is a “story about a bunch of aimless kids recklessly ripping back and forth across the country leaving a trail of missing property, misplaced trust, broken hearts and ruined lives in their wake.”
Tonight my buddy Seth mentioned that he saw on The Wikipedia that “John Updike said that he wrote Rabbit, Runin response to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and tried to depict ‘what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt.'”
This is true. I didn't know that Rabbit, Run was a response to Kerouac, but I like that I happened to read them together and I think Rabbit, Run is the perfect antidote to anyone experiencing too much unwarranted euphoria after reading the beatnik bible. Updike's free spirited protagonist sticks around long enough to get a heavy dose of good, old fashioned cause and effect. The writing in Rabbit, Run is simple and impeccable. There are moments of humor, but mostly it is the story of a selfish fool who needs to grow up. I realize that that may not be the most enticing review, but that's The Way It Is. Updike nailed it.
Before reading Flash Boys, I was only marginally aware of High Frequency Trading and had only a vague notion of what it was. Michael Lewis sheds a lot of light on how it works and who it benefits (hint: not you) and apparently, I wasn't the only one who was in the dark. HFT is usually portrayed as being a net win for the markets because it provides liquidity. That turns out to be far from the truth. Not only is the liquidity provided by HFT a false liquidity that benefits no one, it turns out it's just a way to take advantage of having faster access to market data to essentially skim from “normal” market activity. It's guys with faster connections and privileged access to market data taking your money when you trade while providing you zero benefit whatsoever in return.
You pretty much have to have faith that based on his reputation, Lewis is getting his facts straight since it obviously behooves the HFT traders to obfuscate what they're doing. If he's getting it right though, then there's a lot of crap going down that should shake your faith in the good intentions of majority of stock brokers. Fortunately there is a hint of optimism throughout the book and signs that things are changing, but the situation he describes so well is very much still happening today.
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.
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
Nick Winter is a non-expert who wrote this book in 3 months. That said, there is a lot here that is valuable–his enthusiasm is contagious, he's done some good research and a lot of what he talks about led me off with good directions for additional research.
Don't be deterred by the 3 star rating, you'd be hard pressed to walk away from reading it without feeling excited to learn something new, make more of your life and have a little more fun. That's worth the 3 bucks and 3 hours this book will cost you.
Very good, but because my knowledge of WWI and what led up to it is lacking, the first 1/3 of the book was difficult for me to follow. This isn't a traditional biography that sticks to the life of one person, instead there are several main characters and a lot of, for me, unfamiliar geography. Once I finally settled in though, it was great.
There's a ton here. The first half of the book covers a lot that's pretty well discussed elsewhere, but in the second half, Ramachandran just explodes into a huge fireball of ideas that are expansive not only in their reach but are also impressive in their novelty and creativity. You get the feeling that the only thing keeping him back is time. It's definitely not a lack of important questions and well-designed experiments.
I especially liked his discussion of art and aesthetics and his speculations on why we like abstract art and what makes some art almost irresistible to the human brain. He comes to it with a refreshingly different perspective due to his Indian background. He's unwaveringly scientific, but seems to have a much greater pool of examples to draw from due to the vast cultural landscape India offers. A lot of the book is speculative, but the speculation isn't far-fetched, certainly nowhere near as speculative as most of what today's physicists write about, and he clearly indicates what's solid and what's remains to be tested, often suggesting experiments for others to try.
This book is extremely well done. Everything from the art to the binding to the glossary really gives the feeling that it's a labor of love, nothing is rushed, every detail is considered. The subject is Bertrand Russell and his idealistic (quixotic?) quest to find a way to use logic to irrefutably prove the foundations of mathematics, and by extension, all of reality. The book does a great job of linking him to his influencers, contemporaries and those who took and built on his work while keeping the story moving and entertaining.
I'm not a big fan of Russell, his personality was thorny, he made some colossal intellectual and personal mistakes and ultimately his work on logic, while an important stepping stone, seems to have been almost entirely superseded by Gödel. That said, I'm no expert on the subject and I was heavily biased when Solzhenitsyn, who is one of my heroes and usually very generous in terms of character judgement, criticized Russell pretty brutally in The Gulag Archipelago. Despite all that, this book gave me more respect for Russell's unwavering commitment to finding truth and rationality.
Read it. It'll take you 3 hours.
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.
Gladwell is taking a lot of heat for biasing the examples he chooses in his books to make points that are often later shown to be somewhat tenuous. That may be the case, but he is a heck of a writer. He knows how to tell a compelling story and the conversations he sparks go on for years.
Whatever harm that may come from the lack of rigorousness in his brand of pop-psychology is easily overshadowed by the positive cultural impact that comes from people giving serious consideration to his ideas and how they apply to their personal lives and to society on a larger scale. As with any book, don't read it passively, decide what you buy and what needs to be further examined. Enjoy it, it's a fun read.
[Update]
I came across a cool and relevant quote in The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran from Darwin's The Descent of Man:
“...false facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward errors is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.”
This was the first thing I've read that goes into any detail on the situation of the nuclear situation in the US and the world. Wow. I wasn't convinced I wanted to know so much about missiles and warheads and what it takes to keep them secret and secure, but after I started realizing the scope of what could have gone wrong during the heights of the Cold War the information quickly went from being academic to something much more real.
The number of accidents involving nuclear warheads is surprisingly high. The internal politics revolving around how these weapons should be used are maddening. The scope of the destruction that would have ensued had the Cold War master plan ever been carried out is literally insane. The fact that so many nations to this day have the power to cause that type of destruction makes the relatively stable state of the world seem tenuous to say the least.
Command and Conquer starts off slow, but quickly becomes an engrossing freakshow of the insanity of the Cold War and the truly awful power of the superpowers.
I thought about writing a review in the style of this book. Then my sentences would be short. My sentences would be short and I'd seem completely apathetic about writing the review. I'd also probably choose the most mundane parts of the book to write about. I would not try to be interesting.
I read this book mostly on my iPhone. I read it in an app called Oyster. I was sitting up in bed when I read it. After I read it, I had some organic milk with organic cereal. I watched a TED talk and thought about Breaking Bad. I wasn't thinking about the book anymore because it just wasn't worth thinking about.
This is one of the best books on mastery that I've come across. It's much more than a bunch of summaries of studies and books on practice, it's the wisdom of some amazing teachers who spent a lot of time actually learning and teaching others how to master their fields. Most of the examples in the book are geared toward teaching teachers how to perform, however the techniques are easily applied to any field or endeavor.
The passion for learning the authors bring to the subject is palpable and the presentation is excellent. Also, don't be put off by the “42 Rules” in the title, this a rare exception to the rule that articles and books based on enumerated lists are no good.
Pynchon is obviously smart, sometimes very funny and capable of producing the most unnecessarily complex plot possible. None of which make up for how he constantly shoves his political ideology in your face, how he he introduces a new minor character every 3 pages, giving you yet another inconsequential name to deal with or how all of his characters feel flat and passionless, driven by a bored curiosity more than any sense of justice or meaning. All of which are huge distractions and make the Bleeding Edge unnecessarily tedious, hard to follow, hard to want to try.
And for a novel about technology, Pynchon's descriptions of technology and the Internet were sometimes right on, but more often than not, and in some very fundamental ways, showed a lack of understanding of what he was talking about. Stuff like looking for the right pixel on a web page to click to take them to the right part of the ‘dark web'. Sigh.
So yeah, there are some interesting moments, funny songs, and amazing sentences, and if I really wanted to weave together all the connections between characters and the intricacies of the plot, I'd probably find some beautiful spiderweb with a big old conspiratorial black widow or evil capitalist or something right in the middle but meh. I'll leave that to someone else. I'm (once again) done with Pynchon.
