Tag: book-blog

Book Review: Looking for a Ship, John McPhee

John McPhee is a master writer, and Looking for a Ship is a master narrative. Accompanying second mate Andy Chase during the dying days of the American Merchant Marine in the late ’80s, McPhee crafts a spellbinding tale of ships, sailors and the seas they travel on. There are a stories of bravery and skill, incompetence and foolishness, piracy and prostitutes, bureaucracy and bananas, shipwrecks and storms, and containers full of everything you can imagine and many things you can’t.

Every character is memorably portrayed, and the characters, the people, are all phenomenally interesting. Their struggles and triumphs, little moments of boredom and humanity, are all worth reading about (and nobody describes moustaches like McPhee). These people are masters at their craft, they work extensive and intensive hours, and their jobs are disappearing as they work. McPhee shows the tragedy of this process without eliciting unnecessary pity for the men who work on these ships with pride. He is an observer, but one that makes even the most dull minutiae of the world of the Merchant Marine come to life. Never have container manifests been so interesting.

While Andy Chase is an intriguing character, it is his captain, Paul McHenry Washburn, that shines in this story. Washburn is a man so fascinating, leading a life so rich, that he alone could be the hero of a book series, or even a summer blockbuster.

Looking for a Ship is a treasure of a book, an excellent story about people, craftsmanship, skill, the sea and those that make their living shipping our purchases across it. A highly recommended book for all who read.

Book Review: Dealing With Difficult People – Harvard Business Review

Dealing with Difficult People is part of a series of small booklets on the topic of emotional intelligence that the Harvard Business Review published. It’s a collection of essays, each of them short, well-written, and contains useful and practical information on different aspects of dealing with difficult people in workplace settings: colleagues, bosses, reports and even how do you avoid being a difficult person to work with yourself.

The articles in this collection include “To Resolve a Conflict, First Is It Hot or Cold?” by Mark Gerzon; “Taking the Stress Out of Stressful Conversations,” by Holly Weeks; “The Secret to Dealing with Difficult It’s About You,” by Tony Schwartz; “How to Deal with a Mean Colleague,” by Amy Gallo; “How To Deal with a Passive-Aggressive Colleague,” by Amy Gallo; “How to Work with Someone Who’s Always Stressed Out,” by Rebecca Knight; “How to Manage Someone Who Thinks Everything Is Urgent,” by Liz Kislik; and “Do You Hate Your Boss?” by Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries.

The essays are all interesting and make their points well and concisely. Many of them offer relatively realistic scenarios that you can encounter when dealing with a certain type of difficult person, and then walk you through how to best deal with each scenario. Because all the essays are short the ratio of actionable advice to lines of text in the articles is excellent – there’s no padding or fluff here. There is a good range of tools that you can add to your “people wrangling” toolbox, and that’s always a plus.

Where this booklet falls short is precisely in its brevity. Complex scenarios are breezed through, things are solved relatively easily and on the first try. In reality dealing with difficult people in the workplace is a “superpower” that requires a lot of consistent effort and skill. You will never reach a tolerable equilibrium on the first try – indeed there’s a chance that you will never reach it at all. There is no book, let alone a slim booklet, that can teach you all that it takes in one fell swoop. You’ll need to deal with every situation and person as they occur, and what books of this kind can do is provide you with tools and approaches to do that.

If you are dealing with difficult people in the workplace, then this is book is a good place to start from. Just take into account that it’s going to be a long and hard process, and one little book isn’t going to solve all your problems and give you everything you need. Set your expectations accordingly and you won’t be disappointed.

Book Review: Deacon King Kong – James McBride

This novel contains multitudes.

There’s a story of tight-knit community under threat. There’s a love story of a kind rarely portrayed in fiction these days – one deeply mundane, pragmatic, pedestrian, and also deeply tragic, transformative and profound. There’s a Bildungsroman element, a gangster story element, a mystery, a religious element, and even time devoted to plants. There are many stories of friendships, many of them unlikely, and a few stories of rivalries, some of them rivalries to death. There’s a particular story of friendship, through hardship, alcohol, cheese and furnaces, that is alone worth the read. There’s a budding romance between two star-crossed and not young lovers. There are heart breaking moments, and there are laugh out loud funny ones (the funny ones outnumber the heartaches, I promise). There’s a cop story, a feisty grandma story, a story of racial struggle, and a story of medieval religious art.

Read this book. It’s a delight, it’s full of heart and surprises, and it’s one of the most original works of fiction that you’ll get to read. Wonderfully well written, jumping with life, and a joy to experience.

Weekly Update: 3 year chemo-versary

It’s been three years today since I finished my chemotherapy and have been in remission. I spent the day celebrating with my family, I’ll have another celebration next week, and I’m about to watch Mischief Movie Night In to finish a very nice day indeed.

Having dealt with cancer at a relatively young age sets certain priorities very straight in life. Health, family, friends are above all. I start my journaling every day with a 4-5 things that I’m grateful for. I’m constantly aware that everything in life is fleeting, everything can be taken away from you at any time, so it’s really important to take the time and appreciate everything that you have, even if it’s not always everything that you’ve wanted.

Teddy bears getting ready to be photographed for Inkvent

Reading

I have finished two books this week, Cal Newport’s “How to Become a Straight A Student” and Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital”. Newport’s book was excellent and I plan on using the advice within it to help me prepare for a big certification exam that I’m taking this year. Harvey’s “Orbital” won this year’s Booker prize, which is why I read it, and it’s a complete waste of time. It’s around 140 pages of bloated, purple description, with no plot, no interesting or fleshed out characters, and nothing but platitudes to say about humanity, humankind or the planet. I have no idea why it won, and it was so bad that it completely put me off of trying to read Booker award winning books.

Inkvent

I’ve managed to build a small buffer, which will come in useful as I have to write this year’s Inkvent summary post and I’m still not sure how I’ll tackle it. This year’s calendar isn’t like the ones previous, and so I will need a fresh approach to this summary post this time.

Planning

I’m gearing up to switch planning notebooks after next week, and to start a new quarter. My plan for next quarter is largely ready, and is a little different this time. I’ve pared things down, and I might even streamline them more. I have a week to hammer out the final details, and I’ll likely be dedicating a post to the process in the end.

Have a great week and remember to count your blessings.

Book Review: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

It turns out that when you take a bunch of stuff that you happen to like and put it in a blender, a book doesn’t come out. That should have been the tagline for this best-selling mediocre, patchwork of little substance.

“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin starts very promisingly. The first chapter, and particularly the first half of the first chapter is wonderfully well written and a joy to read. Then there are parts here and there, certain imaginative landscapes and certain descriptions mostly, that are excellently written. But the novel as a whole is a giant void of nothingness, lavishly sprinkled with clichés and woke politics, with “spicy” characters and themes thrown in every time Zevin felt that she might be losing her reader. Reading this book is like eating at a fast food restaurant – things may look enticing at first, but there’s no there there and you end up leaving hungry.

Some main points:

  • The childish, selfish, self involved, self destructive Sadie and Sam (the main characters) don’t change at all during this novel. They behave as adults exactly as they behaved as children. Not only is this incredibly boring, it’s also bewildering that this was termed a “coming of age” novel. They don’t grow up, so what exactly is the plot here?
  • There is no plot. It’s just time passing with incidents and character behaviours and interactions that are unearned and unwarranted. The only reason things seem to be “happening” is because Zevin feels like she might be losing her reader. The happening is in brackets because the events show little to no lasting effect on the main characters’ behaviour or choices beyond the superficial. The worst of these “happenings” is the killing off of a likeable character. Once he’s killed you realize that the only reason he was there and was likeable was so that Zevin can kill him off. It’s unwarranted, unearned, and insulting to the intelligence of the reader. It’s then that you realize that his involvement with Sadie and Sam was so outlandish in the first place that Zevin felt the need to justify it several times in the novel.
  • The characters include (I kid you not): a manic dream pixie girl that composes music naked to feel closer to her instrument, a Jewish Korean only child that is a talented math nerd who goes to an Ivy League college, a gay video game designer couple, a Jewish princess video game designer, an ex-Mormon video game designer couple. The book is trying so hard to be woke that it is breaking into a sweat and not really addressing or representing the historical era it is set in or the video game industry. As a woman in tech, a system programmer in an as male dominated field as Sadie’s, her experience is utterly, utterly unrepresentative. There’s lip service in a few scenes where Sam get the credit for her work, but Zevin was clearly not really interested in tackling the experience of always being the only woman in a room full of people who don’t believe you should be there.
  • The book skirts all kinds of interesting themes (sexism, racism, abuse, trauma, disability, the immigrant experience, financial and class disparities, creative ruts) but tackles non of them. They all just go “whoosh” by, leaving no mark, placed there just as if they were chores on Zevin’s to do list.

My guess is that reviewers and book club recommenders were taken in by the first chapter and didn’t really trudge through the entire 400 plus pages of the book. I would strongly recommend that you spend your reading time elsewhere. The bits and pieces that are worth reading aren’t worth the bits and pieces that are not.

Oh, and the use of Shakespeare (and “The Iliad”) is utterly unearned and jarring. I have no idea how either Zevin or her publisher had the gall to name the book after such a masterpiece of a speech.

Book Review: Tokyo Express – Seichō Matsumoto

Set in 1958 this tightly plotted, precise and polished mystery/detective story is very set in its time. Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto, translated from Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood, is a masterwork of minimalist craftsmanship. No detail is extraneous. No scene could be cut. The setting starts as a thriller more than a murder mystery, but turns into a murder mystery a few chapters in.

This is a novel of timetables and alibis, politics and very realistic oftentimes tedious and frustrating detective work. While “Tokyo Express” has a general air of melancholy about it, it shows more empathy to its detectives than to its murder victims. The result feels a bit like a Japanese take on noir fiction, with a more minimalist take on the genre. It’s not that you dislike the victims (as is common in Golden Age detective novels), it’s that you are kept at the same distance from them as the detectives have.

This is also not the “amateur sleuth saves the day in the face of stupid detectives” type of novel. The detectives are thorough, thoughtful, methodical, not easily fooled. They use no flashy techniques, no DNA, no modern day CSI methods. It’s the old fashioned repeated, grey work of questioning people, trying to get timetables sorted out, working in small steps that the reader is always privy too (no Sherlock Holmes-like jumps made by omitting key points in the narrative).

There is nothing flashy in “Tokyo Express”. There is superb craftsmanship and a very noir novel that is well set in its time and place. I enjoyed reading it and I particularly liked the addition of maps and timetables to the book. Even if detective novels aren’t your usual fare, I’d give “Tokyo Express” a read, as it’s not the usual “whodunnit” fare.

Book Review: 4321 – Paul Auster

When I started reading “4321” Paul Auster was still alive. By the time I finished it he had passed away. That does add an element of difficulty when discussing a work that is far from perfect – one feels that it’s somehow rude to point out the flaws in a recently deceased author’s works.

Nevertheless, here’s my review:

“4321” is doorstop of a book, a massive tome that demands quite a lot of time but not a lot of effort to read. Auster is good writer and he is very capable of writing very readable books. At no point during “4321” will you feel that the writing drags or that you’re struggling to understand what’s going on. In his telling and retelling of Archie Ferguson’s life in all four variations of it, Auster very adeptly makes sure that you don’t lose sight of the plot and get confused wondering which version of Archie are you tracking now.

That’s the highlight of this book, and it may also be its downfall. “4321” is Auster in his most polished, most controlled, and most repetitive. It’s all the previous themes that you’ve met in previous Auster novels, coupled with Auster’s own biography and his love for certain types of characters and relationships. It’s like watching Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet” – a work of supreme technical difficulty and accomplishment, polished to a mirror-like quality, and reflecting only the creator himself. Somehow after more than 900 pages you realize that there’s no there there.

The most interesting characters are the ones that Auster glosses over, slotting them into their role in Archie’s narrative (his mother Rose is perhaps the most glaring example of this), and the characters he does care about are… uninteresting. Archie, through his 4 turns in life, never evolves. He’s always a detached, not very interesting young man that looks at the events of the century from the sidelines. His friends also never evolve, and while his path to becoming a writer might be fascinating to Auster, it wasn’t very interesting to me. It was too neat, too clean, too uncomplicated. The whole thing was rather bloodless, the rank opposite of Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” which is a messy but punchy and lively affair.

You spend over 900 pages of uncomplicated, almost light reading, and get to… not a lot really. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been written about elsewhere and much better about love, life, creation and the creative mind. What you do get is to view the supreme craftsmanship of a very good storyteller. Maybe that’s enough. For me it wasn’t.

On Reading Difficult Books

Is there a book that you want to read but scares you? It’s too long, or too technically demanding, or its subject matter is challenging — is there such a book on your virtual or physical bookshelf?

I have several such books waiting to be read. I also make a point to read several such books each year. They’re nearly always worth the effort.

Goodreads and its annual reading challenge make readers favour short, quick reads, skim reading and light reading. This is not by chance, but this isn’t a post about the failures of Goodreads as a platform. This is a post about reading difficult books, and the point is that if you want to challenge yourself you’re going to have to make a concerted effort on your own.

You will have to motivate yourself because reading platforms and book clubs skew towards books that can be read quickly and relatively easily, and we’re being trained daily to shorten our attention span and ruin our capacity to concentrate and think by platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. To read difficult books is to go against the grain, to retrain your mind to deep, meaningful thought, to long stretches of concentration, to a higher level of empathy. It’s the difference between a fast food burger and an evening with a 3 star Michelin chef showing off his best work. It’s worth it, but it costs more.

If you chose to go on that challenging but worthwhile journey, here are some tips to help you along the way:

  • Build up to it – don’t start with the toughest, longest, scariest book on your list and try to white knuckle your way through. Build up to it by stretching and building up your reading and concentration “muscles” first. If you’re building up to length, for example, fantasy and space opera sci-fi novels are a great way to get there, as they’re usually well paced, relatively easy reads. Historical fiction and family sagas can train you to follow multiple timelines and characters, and short stories utilizing modernist and post-modernist techniques can offer an easier way to encounter them for the first time.
  • Have a light read going simultaneously – this is particularly effective if the book you’re tackling has a difficult subject matter. Have a light, fun read going on at the same time and switch between the two, allowing yourself a break from the difficult topic and time to process it every once in a while.
  • Find a partner for the journey – find a friend, online or in real life, who’s interested in reading the same book as you are, and help each other through it.
  • Find a community – it’s difficult to find a friend interested and able to dedicate time to take the reading journey with you, but it may be possible to find a community of readers going through the book at the same time as you are. It can be through a local bookclub, a virtual bookclub, a reddit community, a Goodreads group, a discord channel – whatever group you can find and suits you. Just make sure you’re comfortable with the group rules in terms of code of conduct and spoilers, and feel free to leave if you encounter toxic behaviour.
  • Create a framework to help you through – ideas for this can include various trackers, reminders, applications like Forest or other Pomodoro like counters that help you focus, little treats or incentives after reaching certain milestones. If I’m reading a particularly long book, I set up a dedicated tracker and a page count I want to hit every day, to make sure that I don’t feel overwhelmed and can visually see my progress. It somehow helps me deal with the goblin in my mind that is screaming that this book is too much for me and I don’t have time for it. Field notes are great for this, especially the squared and reticle grid ones.
  • Start by reading a good chunk – on your first read at least the first chapter or several chapters, so that you get into the flow and tone of the book as soon as possible. I tend to aim for 30-50 pages on the first sitting.
  • Get a physical copy of the book, not a digital one. Paper books are easier and more enjoyable to read than digital ones, as our mind finds them easier to process because of the way we read (oftentimes returning a page or two back to check on something, or flipping to a previous chapter to remind ourselves who that character is or what happened last time). Whenever I’ve tried to read a difficult book on my Kindle, I’ve regretted it (The Alexandria Quartet is the latest example).
  • Feel free to give up, tomorrow – if the book is too much for you, it’s OK to decide that you’re not going to finish it, or you’re going to get back to it at a later date. But before you do that, take one more day to make an effort and read another chunk anyway. Why? Because you may have just reached a particular tough spot, and in a few pages things clear up, or become easier to digest. Also, you may just be having a bad day, or you’re particularly distracted or tired and so the writing becomes more opaque or more of a slog. Give it another day and if it doesn’t improve, move on.
Tracker for Paul Auster’s 4321 on a Field Notes Snowy Evening with a Spoke Design pen.

I’m currently reading Paul Auster’s 4321, which is a challenging read due to its length and its structure. Later on this year I plan to reread James Joyce’s Ulysses (I read it twice cover to cover already, and studied it while taking my degree). I’m considering tracking my rereading here, in case someone wants to follow along. Let me know in the comments if that’s something that may interest you.