I bought A Visit from the Goon Squad back in 2011, as it was part of that year’s Tournament of Books. It has languished on my Kindle ever since. This year, however, I have decided to read the oldest unread books on my Kindle, and so it was A Visit from the Goon Squad’s turn.
First of all, the book has a dreadful name. It’s trying to be sophisticated, it ends up being uninformative and unappealing. It’s sounds like a book about comedians, or maybe a family saga of some kind, but it’s basically a string of partially connected episodes about people that work or have worked in the music industry.
The post Pulitzer win book cover
I almost gave up on this book as about 50 pages in I found myself not liking any of the characters and finding the narrative dull and bland. Then Rhea appeared, and I found myself pulled into the story. She redeemed the book, and it got better and better as I read along.
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a very readable book, apart from the deliberately dreadful writing of the only writer in the novel, Jules Jones. There’s a character that didn’t redeem himself – the more I saw of him the less I liked.
The book didn’t age well, and will likely age even worse with time. It’s embedded in a certain era – pre smart phones, social media and AI – but it’s not written in a way that will allow it to be timeless. The powerpoint penultimate chapter reads as a dated gimmick, and the last, “futuristic” chapter is truly terrible. It really brings the book down, as even for its time it serves mainly as a window to Egan’s biases and anxieties more than to the true zeitgeist of the time.
Egan’s choice to build the narrative on episodic encounters with loosely connected characters was groundbreaking for the time, and the book won a Pulitzer Prize. In 2019 Bernadine Evaristo will take this concept and do it much, much better with Girl, Woman, Otherthus leaving Egan’s novel in the dust.
While I don’t regret reading A Visit from the Goon Squad I wouldn’t recommend it. It didn’t stand the test of time, there are much better books to read, and it’s attempt to capture the zeitgeist of a time so fleeting it practically didn’t exist (the oughts) isn’t worth the reader’s time. Read Evaristo’s novel instead.
A fairy tale for grown ups, Uprooted by Noami Novik is a beguiling novel about being deeply rooted in a place, and yet also uprooted, a perpetual stranger in your homeland and community.
“Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.” Agnieszka loves her valley home, her quiet village, the forests and the bright shining river. But the corrupted Wood stands on the border, full of malevolent power, and its shadow lies over her life. Her people rely on the cold, driven wizard known only as the Dragon to keep its powers at bay. But he demands a terrible price for his help: one young woman handed over to serve him for ten years, a fate almost as terrible as falling to the Wood.
The next choosing is fast approaching, and Agnieszka is afraid. She knows-everyone knows-that the Dragon will take Kasia: beautiful, graceful, brave Kasia, all the things Agnieszka isn’t, and her dearest friend in the world. And there is no way to save her. But Agnieszka fears the wrong things. For when the Dragon comes, it is not Kasia he will choose.
Like all good fairy tales and myths, Uprooted has a compelling, readable narrative that sweeps you from the first paragraph about “Our Dragon” to the very end (which like good fairy tales also ends with Agnieszka talking about the Dragon). It evokes Polish and Russian folklore, Greek mythology, and classic fairy tales in a Polish medieval setting. You can tell just how much Novik knows and loves the source material she draws on, and how much respect she has for the cultures that wove these stories of magical beings, wizardry and mythic beasts to deal with the dark terrors of their world.
Novik is a magical story teller and Uprooted manages to be both very much part of the fantasy world that she creates, and also a timeless tale about identity, belonging, and love. There is a lot of heart in this adventure, a lot of compassion for the characters within it. Novik manages to create not only a very believable world, but a cast of real, nuanced characters: heroes with flaws, villains that you understand and feel compassion for.
Naomi Novik is a phenomenally good fantasy author, and this book justifiably won awards. If you liked her Scholomance series you will love Uprooted, and I am looking forward to reading more of Novik’s work.
Yesterday was the last day of Tom Sachs and Nikecraft’s I.S.R.U Summer Camp challenge. Since the 17th of August you could download the ISRU (In Situ Resource Utilization) app and participate in a series of “rituals” to earn points towards getting the chance to purchase Sachs’s coveted Mars Yard 3.0 Nike sneakers.
Tape waiting for the Out and Back ritual
So what’s the deal with the shoes? You can see a film about the Mars Yard shoes here, but for me personally they are just cool shoes with an interesting design story. I downloaded the app out of curiosity and even though I participated in all the “rituals” and am currently in the 95th percentile of people on the ISRU app’s leaderboard, I doubt that I will get the chance to purchase them.
Part of my wall in the ISRU app.
I’m writing about this challenge and this app because after a month and a half of participation I think the rituals and habits that I garnered from the experience are worth sharing.
There are six daily rituals in the app, and they were revealed week-by-week. If you plan on participating, I’d suggest adding all the rituals gradually and in the same order that they were added in the app: you are building a set of disciplines after all.
The rituals are:
Ten Free Throws – shoot 10 free throws at something. I settled on a small box and a crumpled piece of paper as a ball, and I use an orange and a black sharpie to keep score on the box. This seems silly but it’s a lot of fun and a quick palette cleanser in the middle of the day.
Output Before Input – if there’s only one ritual/habit that you should take from this it’s this one. When you wake up, don’t reach for your phone. Create something instead. I started out this ritual by journaling, but now I’m sketching in the morning and it’s the best way to start the day.
Out and Back – another great habit – run for 20 minutes, and mark the halfway point. I run for more than 20 minutes usually, and there are rest days when I walk, but this has been a great reminder to get out there and move.
Wall Drawing – tire out your arms with push ups, and then draw a line on a “wall” (either a real one or a piece of paper). Stop when your line touches a previous line or when you lift your pencil up from the wall or when you reach the end. Mark your stopping point with a red X. This is a way to get push ups and some interesting artwork done.
Read Before Bed – read a physical book before bed instead of staring at a screen. Excellent ritual, and one that I really needed.
Medicine Ball – create your own medicine ball out of cans, bubble wrap and duck tape (I used the one in the gym), and perform 5 daily exercises with it.
Apart from these there was a one time “Choose Your Ritual” challenge where you had to create a 1 minute or less movie about your ritual and upload it to the app. This was a tough challenge, but it got me to learn iMovie and how to edit videos on my phone, so I really appreciate it.
Even though the challenge has ended I’ve decided to continue doing these daily rituals and updating the app. These are just good habits to have and the ISRU app is a pretty great habit tracker for these.
There are also some great films that were uploaded to the app as part of the challenge. My favourite is How to Learn How to Surf.
How about you? Did you participate in the challenge? Are you interested in any of these rituals?
A smorgasbord of stuff for your delectation to celebrate my birthday. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here. Only one more part after this one…
23. Lightening Book Review #3: The Vinyl Detective – Noise Floor by Andrew Cartmel. This is the the 7th Vinyl Detective book and possibly the weakest so far. Set in the world of 1980s electronic music it’s not about finding a rare vinyl record this time, but rather finding an aging electronic musician. There’s the usual hipster/foodie/audiophile vibes but the plot is air thin, you will immediately know whodunnit in the whodunnit, and there’s a desperate attempt to give this Scooby-Do style adventure an “edginess” using aging threesomes and references to John Fowler’s The Magus. There is the usual boring insistence on describing every turn in every journey the protagonists take, and the characters are even more cartoony than usual. The only truly enjoyable scene is the village fête in the end, and even that is highly unbelievable. Feel free to skip this one, unless you’re looking for a cozy, featherlight read between other books and there’s nothing better lined up.
Scene from today’s run
24. Lightening Book Review #4:The Vinyl Detective – Underscore, by Andrew Cartmel. This is why I still read this series – a cozy and highly imaginative adventure with a likeable cast, in a charming and vivid setting. The crime is stylized, the new characters are vivacious and it reminds me of my favourite book in the series, Victory Disc (book #3). Take a trip back to London in the 60s, with a dash of family drama, a hint of Italian passion thrown in, and of course a sprinkling of good music.
25. Lightening Book Review #5:The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman. While we’re on the topic of cozy mysteries, this one was a treat. Unexpected plot full of twists and turns, a memorable and original cast of characters, a unique setting, humour and heartache, and a it dared to touch on actual issues with substance (aging, sickness and death, religious oppression, capitalism and corruption, and the limitations of the law and its enforcers). A very enjoyable read and not just because Elizabeth is now one of my favourite fictional characters.
26. My Apple Watch Ultra 2 has been acting up lately – it’s almost 2 years old and it’s been losing battery power and struggling to keep track of my laps in the pool. So far a full charge and a restart before every swim have helped, but it’s annoying. A watch at this price level should be able to last for 3 years at least, and yet we’ve somehow been trained to expect to upgrade our watches every year or two at the most, if only because they lose their ability to keep a charge after the first year or so. Originally my watch lasted almost 3 days between charges (and I’m a very active person). Now I have to charge it once a day. I’ve been contemplating moving to a Garmin for my workouts and switching back to an analog watch, but I use some of the Apple Watch capabilities to keep track of my health post treatments, so we’ll see.
27. I have ordered the Moleskine Limited Edition Peanuts notebooks (the yellow lined large hardcover and two sets of the extra large cahier notebooks). There’s something about this collection that I find irresistible, and so they will be part of my birthday gifts this year.
28. There’s something tragic about an unfilled and unfulfilled notebook and I have too many of those lying around. I’m considering what to do with them, especially with those that I’ve started using and have abandoned after a few pages. Let me know in the comments if you have any ideas.
29. Tomorrow I start reading Ulysses having just finished The Obstacle is the Way, the last book that I planned to read in May.
30. Lightening Book Review #6:The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. I read the 10th anniversary edition of this book, which has a new introduction and a few additions to it. This is a very digestible intro to stoicism, competently written and researched by a man with a marketing background, but it had the same affect on me that Seth Godin’s books have: it glanced on my brain and left no mark. It was hard to concentrate on this book not because it was challenging but because it was not: it was like eating easily digestible, flavourless popcorn with sprinklings of anecdotal salt at the beginning of each tiny chapter. You are left hungry and unsatisfied at the end, not sure what exactly you consumed. Philosophy should make you sit up and pay attention, think, stretch your mind and sweat a bit. It was divorced from its gravitas, substance and challenge in this book, and that’s a pity.
31. There’s no greater joy than crumpling yesterday’s to do list and tossing it out.
It’s been a long while since I’ve posted a weekly update, and it’s my birthday week, so to celebrate I decided to write 43 points (split up to several posts to make them more manageable), in no practical order:
After a bit of drama I have managed to enrol to the 2025 Urban Sketchers’ Symposium in Poznan, Poland. I will be posting about my sketchbook and art supplies packing list later on, but do let me know in the comments if you’ll be there.
Rising tariffs and shipping costs have made online pen, ink and paper purchases prohibitively expensive for me. This may not be a bad thing, as it should encourage me to use the large stash of “stuff” that I already have.
I have been gifting people nice notebooks and pens lately, and it’s been a surprisingly heartwarming success. Giving people a notebook that matches their style and needs, coupled with a pen that suites them and an encouragement to start journaling about their lives has been one of the joys of my life in recent months.
Moleskine came out with a cool Peanuts collection of notebooks and Blackwing pencils (plus a backpack and set of pins). It’s refreshing to see them use the XL cahiers for a limited edition, as I don’t think they’ve done that since the Art collection about a decade ago.
Lightening Book Review #1 (I have a huge pile of books to review and not enough time to write a dedicated post for all of them): When the Moon Hits Your Eye, John Scalzi. Scalzi is normally very good at humorous sci-fi, but this book is not one of his successes. It’s an overtly silly, very lightweight book that is not on par with the other books he groups in this loosely thematic trilogy, The Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain. It really suffers from the constant jumping around amongst a giant cast – the plot loses momentum, and you find it hard to connect to any set of characters. While it was not great hardship reading it and it’s a decent light read, feel free to skip this one and wait for the next instalment of his “Old Man’s War” series.
It’s OK to splurge and buy yourself flowers every once in a while, if you enjoy flowers.
I’ve started rucking, which is basically walking at a brisk pace outside with weight on your back. I use an Osprey hiking daypack weighed down mostly with water, but also with a giant cookbook, my journal and kindle, which brings it to around 10kg of weight. I take a break about 15 minutes into my session to sit outside and journal or meditate. If you’re curious, start with a bag that has a waist belt and not too much weight for too long, and skip the $400 overhyped specialized bags and weight plates.
Go see a play (not a musical or comedy) at your local theatre. It’s a great way to open yourself to new ideas and perspectives – especially those that you don’t agree with.
Lightening Book Review #2: Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus. I really wanted to like this book, but the combination of graphic, repetitive and unrelenting “period piece” misogyny and sexual assault coupled with a frankly unbelievable, non-relatable and largely unlikable heroine made it impossible. Couple this with an even less believable daughter and dog (though the dog is cute), lots of didactic and condescending lecturing that is so blatantly not period true and can at times be needlessly offensive (was the vegetarian bashing necessary?) and this was a book that I didn’t really enjoy. The cooking show, dog and rowing bits were nice, though.
Marvel’s Thunderbolts*/New Avengerts is a delightful, touching, thrilling and generally great movie. It’s well worth the cinema visit, and I plan to rewatch it once it lands on Disney+.
Please don’t do things just so that you can post about them on social media. That’s no way to live your life. It’s the equivalent of voluntarily turning yourself into one of the Matrix human batteries – for AI training models’ and advertisers' use.
A few months ago I published an overview of my new weekly review format. I had been successfully using it for a few months at the time, and I have since continued to use it until about a month ago. Since then I’ve tweaked it a bit to streamline things and speed up the review process. If you found my previous review format a bit confusing or elaborate, you might want to try my new one.
The new review format consists of four questions that I answer at the end of every week before I build next week’s plan. I write down my answers in my regular journal (currently the Stalogy 365 B6) using last week’s plan as a reference. Here are the new questions:
What Worked – no change from last time, except that I allow myself to elaborate more and I don’t emphasize the order of the things that I did and that I want to keep doing. I discovered that it doesn’t really matter if something worked because I changed things, remained consistent or stopped doing something, the only thing that really matters is that it worked. Being more loose here allows me to spend more time reflecting positively on the week instead of worrying about writing things in a certain order. An example from the past week – exercise. I got a 10k in, my first speed run since my last race, two gym sessions, two swimming sessions, two rucking sessions and a bunch of walking and NTC pre and post workout stretches. Prioritizing these sessions in my weekly plan, doing them first thing in the morning and setting out workout clothes and gym/pool bags the night before really aided my success.
What Didn’t Work – this changed slightly to not only include things that didn’t work due to planning, priorities, “life” or infrastructure but also things that cause me anxiety or distress that need some rethinking. An example from the past week – I went back to watching YouTube videos as a “self soothing” source of comfort. We live in stressful times and I’m going through a stressful period at work, so it’s clear that I need something to provide this “warm blanket” function. The issue is that I oftentimes use reading as a source of comfort, and I’m currently reading a book that is purposefully designed to induce anxiety in the reader. Note that at this point I’m not focusing on what to do about the things that didn’t work. My point is just to acknowledge them and if relevant name the feelings they induce.
What’s Next – this is the biggest difference from the previous review format. Here I write down what I plan to try and keep or change or observe in the coming week. This feeds directly into my weekly plan, and will help me get the most out of last week’s experiences. So in the case of the examples above, I’m going to keep to an identical general exercise plan in the coming week, and I’m going to add a “comfort book” to my current reading rotation. If anything more long term needs to happen due to these reviews I will just add it to my quarterly plan. The point is not just to blindly follow a plan, but to try things, observe, reflect and change them if needed.
You’ll note that I removed the “people of the week” section. I just found it redundant, as these three questions generally cover it.
As usual, I’d love to hear more about your weekly review formats, and if you found this helpful.
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.
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.
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.
This book won the Booker award, the 2024 Booker award, and for the life of me I don’t know why.
Though the book’s subtitle is “a novel”, at 137 pages Orbital is basically a novella. Mostly it’s a book about nothing, involving six people that you are guaranteed to not care much about, set in the International Space Station. Garnish the whole thing with a mountain of purple prose, and that’s Orbital for you.
Could Harvey have come up with a more interesting premise involving the International Space Station (ISS)? Of course she could. What if Orbital would have been set during the pandemic, with astronauts basically stranded up there, worried about their families and friends, worried about their resupply or how to get back home (see also the eight day space mission that will last for nine months). What if one of the astronauts that was meant to return from orbit refused to return? (It happened in the past). There’s no end to the interesting dramatic situations that being in orbit in the ISS offers. Harvey will have none of that.
The astronauts themselves are a dull lot, that you learn very little about. There’s a religious guy with a postcard that’s supposed to be profound but isn’t; there’s an Italian guy that went scuba diving on his honey moon; there’s a Japanese woman who’s mother dies of old age (spoiler: that’s the drama in the novel); there’s a woman that’s possibly Irish, possibly British that has a peculiar non-relationship with her husband, but don’t worry we don’t get to explore that. And there are two Russian guys. That’s the extent of the characters in Orbital, and that’s how well you get to know them or care about them.
The novella takes place during 16 orbits of the ISS around earth, and there’s a giant typhoon that takes place during a few of these orbits. There’s a weird “white saviour” bit, but without the “saviour” part of it with the Italian astronaut and a poor fisherman’s family that he met during his honeymoon and we’re to believe they kept in close touch with for years until the story takes place. Don’t worry – Harvey doesn’t want drama anywhere near her work, so there is none even at this point.
What there is a lot of is self-involved, bloated purple prose about the beauty and fragility of our planet, space and humanity. None of it is earned, none of it is attached to the narrative, all of it could have been cut out – but then there would be no Orbital.
I rarely review books that I dislike, and I should have given up on Orbital a quarter of the way through, like I originally wanted, but I didn’t. So let this be a warning to you: not all Booker award winners are worth reading.
Writing at Large 