Now This is a Library (Stockholm's, to be exact)

Actually - an artist's concept to be even more exact, a proposal for the Stockholm library. Still, I like it.

The "Five Books You Have to Read" Store

On our recent trip, I slipped into a few bookstores. One in particular left me feeling like I could have purchased another 15 books if only I wasn't already behind in my reading by about 15 books. I love the mad diversity in a modern bookstore and - from experience - have come to believe that there are an abundance of amazing books waiting for my attention. And these wonderfully full, bursting at the seams bookstores have begun to make me weary for the very reason that they once made me so happy: they simply have too many enticing titles.

Which brings me to my idea for bookstore. Rather than have thousands and thousands of titles, just have a bookstore titled, "The 5 Books You Have to Read." And then carry only five titles. If people come in asking for a different title, you simply say, "Have you read all five of our books?" If not (and that's usually the case), just redirect them to the short list. If they have, tell them to be patient - the list changes. Eventually. "Live. Don't just read," the clerk would tell them. "There will be a new book you simply have to read soon enough. Get caught up on your chores. Visit your old aunt. Hike through a copse of trees. Volunteer. And then come back in about a month. We'll have at least one new book on the list by then."

Oh, and how do we choose the five books? Don't even get me started on that. Because as soon as you make this part explicit, you get dragged into the whole business of whose list and why not another list and what about people who need large print or children or business majors or beach reading or .... And that's just the kind of confusion that leads to bookstores that - on a single day - stock more titles than you could hope to read in a lifetime. And my bookstore would put an end to that.

From Self Absorbed to Self Aware - the Return of the Novel?

The novel’s great era didn’t just coincide with the rise of the university and the specialist because of rising levels of literacy – it helped to ameliorate the feelings of anomie and isolation of the specialist. Suddenly, a growing number of workers found themselves busy in tasks that required focus that excluded others and unique skills that made it difficult to relate to friends and families. The novel made us feel less alone.

But the novel did more than provide access to the inner life of others, giving us access to the psychic space of the woman in the apartment across the hall or the guy in the next office. It reassured us that our own insecurities, lusts, petty grievances, and imaginings did not make us freaks but, instead, made us part of the human race. Everyone, as it turns out, has some kind of struggle.

And yet today, the world of reality TV and Internet confessionals – media like blogs and YouTube – now provides us with ample reassurance that our petty neuroses and animal instincts are not unique. And maybe celebrity stories and powerful video has eroded reading.

But I think that this comes with a cost. Novels force reflection that video and quick articles or posts do not. In a novel, we’re forced to project ourselves into the lives of the character. A good novel will actually kick start our own process of reflection. A novel makes our own thoughts more articulate, providing us with not just vocabulary but vocabulary of the inner life. Through a great novel, we discover some portion of ourselves.

Gaining access to the inner life by video and celebrity scrutiny, by contrast, seems to confuse self absorption and self awareness. We lose ourselves in the characters we see but we are never really forced to consider our own lives, never made to reflect.

All this to report some potentially good news. By one measure, reading is still lower than it was in the early 1980s or 90s but rose over the last 12 months for the first time since 1982. If our mindless living –invasions, spending, and eating of the last few decades - has done anything, it has certainly provided us with material enough to think about. It might provoke us to become more contemplative, more reflective. Crazy optimist that I am, I love the notion of this possibility.

What Are You Reading? (The Page 123, Line 5 Meme)

After an intense week on site with a client, my brain feels like flan. Cce offered this irresistible meme, a way to rally the brain cells back to the process of writing.

The meme is this: grab the book nearest to your left elbow, open to page 123, and then copy the sixth, seventh, and eighth sentences. As it turns out, this seemingly innocuous meme makes me look hopelessly nerdy. I would have so preferred to look hip to the jive.

First, this from Richard Bookstaber's A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation, a book I found myself drawn into on the flight out and back last week.

The most recently issued bond, termed the on-the-run bond, becomes the standard for trading. When traders enter orders to buy or sell the 30-year, the on-the-run bond is the bond they mean. This trading demand means the on-the-run bond enjoys a liquidity premium - that is, it trades at a slightly higher price than its less interesting older brothers which, though once on-the-run bonds themselves, are now beyond their six months of fame.

As I write this, two things become clear to me. One, why it is that when I first began this book months ago, I put it down. (And yet this week, his story about how our financial markets have become so volatile snapped through the definitional necessities to engage me.) Two, why I developed a sense of humor. Any young man who finds such ideas fascinating is sure to become a social pariah if he can't also tell a joke. I learned early in life that most people did not share my interest in the arcane world of underlying social constructs that give us the visible but that most everyone finds ill-timed bodily functions like farts or erections a great source of humor.

In an attempt to prove that I also read less dense fare, I tried the meme on another book, the second book taken on my recent trip. The Best American Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers, is full of whimsy. It includes the story that Hemingway wrote when challenged to write a complete story in six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never used." And yet, the meme brings me directly to yet another fascinating to me, yet almost intentionally dense, bit of prose - this one from futurist Ray Kurzweil, writing about longevity.

If we factor in the exponential advances in computation and communication (price-performance multiplying by a factor of a billion in twenty-five years, while at the same time shrinking in size by a factor of thousands), these scenarios are highly realistic.
The apparent dangers are not real, but unapparent dangers are real. The apparent dangers are that a dramatic reduction in the death rate will create overpopulation and thereby strain energy and other resources and exacerbate environmental degradation.

Now feeling self conscious about the kind of stuff I read, I turned to the next book piled on my left and find a dry excerpt from one of George Washington's speeches, elaborated upon by Gore Vidal in his book Inventing a Nation. One more time I try the meme, drawing from Marty Lefkoe's Re-create Your Life.

Now Frank described a pattern that bothered him: "I use sarcastic, flippant, glib humor to mask my insecurity. I use it to take the offensive. I use it to negate compliments. If I get loving, supportive comments, I do this to deal with the fear that it will be taken away."

Or perhaps Frank is just dealing with the fact that his interests are oddly esoteric and his acceptance into any group hangs by the thin thread of humor.

Life Hiker, Thomas, HRH, Dave, and jen, if you would like, try your hand at the meme. I'm curious about what you're reading.

Book-Reading Liberals & Mouth-Breathing Moderates?

Liberals read more than conservatives, according to a widely reported poll (look here at Houston Chronicle article, for example.)

According to the poll, nearly 30% of Americans had not read a book in the past year. Conservatives are 50% more likely to say that they have NOT read a book in the past year (22% of liberals vs. 34% of conservatives). Books read most frequently? The Bible and romance books. (Even readers are simply looking for love, it seems.)

Of those who have read a book in the last year, the difference between conservatives and liberals was smaller. Liberals have typically read about 9 and conservatives about 8. Most interesting, moderates have read only 5.

Is this, as Res publica says, indication that moderates are mouth breathers who haven't evolved into conservatives or liberals simply because they haven't thought through their positions enough to have actually formed an opinion? Is it true that moderates don't read, don't think, and don't take positions?

I might be inclined to accept this if I didn't think of myself as a moderate. Yet moderate is a funny label. To Europeans I would probably seem like a moderate. To my fellow Americans I'm sure I'd be considered a liberal. Rush Limbaugh would think I am a communist (but to be fair, I think he's a fascist). I read about 2 to 5 books a month, depending on the weather, time spent on airplanes, and whether it's a month with 28 days or 31. I can't remember when I last read a romance book, but I do frequently read the Bible.

This might, in part, reveal just how hard it is to group individuals into categories. One of my favorite authors would have likely taken offense at the very notion of a poll that divided people into liberal or conservative positions, a simplistic dichotomy he blamed on TV.

"Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative."
- Kurt Vonnegut

The novel was a brilliant invention that helped, in turn, with the invention of the modern individual. It did for the late 19th and early 20th century what realistic art did for the definition of self in the Renaissance. Book reading remains one of the most personal experiences, requiring a kind of participation from the individual not found at Disneyland.

Book readers are more likely to have defined themselves. Sometimes that definition of self accords with the categories offered by the mass media. Yet the most interesting people I know defy categorization and generalization. They are individuals.

If the people who designed this poll had read more books, they might have had a sense of this. Must have been a bunch of mouth-breathing moderates to have so summarily dismissed the individuality of people they are so eager to force into pre-defined categories.

13 books that changed my teenaged life

This meme is from A Shrewdness of Apes. It was a fascinating exercise in remembering books that I so loved and was amazed by when I was between the ages of 12 and 20. I grew up without a TV and read voraciously, so this was fun.

13 books that changed my teenage life (in what my hazy memory suggests may be chronological order):

1. Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. These were the teen years, right? So it included the early teens when I raced through these great, plot-driven stories. I still think that Burroughs’ cliff hanging chapters were some of the most exciting I’ve read and I refuse to return to them to learn that his books were, in fact, not so great.

2. Various by Louis L’Amour. All forgettable, all gone through like a bag of potato chips on 4th of July weekend. For a few hours, I felt like the good guy.

3. Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. I was so amazed that someone could so easily manipulate the craft of fiction writing and reach directly into a reader’s mind. Between about 15 and 18, Vonnegut was my hero.

4. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Now that I’m a business consultant, I realize that this is not just hilarious – it is the best book on organizational behavior I’ve yet read. A critic once told Heller, “You haven’t written anything as good since.” He quipped, “No one has.” He was right.

5. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Reading this made me feel oddly exhilarated, like I’d just been privy to an incredible performance that was put on for me as a private audience. It must have been how kings felt when people like Bach performed just for them.

6. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa. A brilliant play on stories within stories that put two wildly improbable worlds into a collision course. It wasn’t just a great excuse for wonderful story telling; it was a tour de force in fiction writing.

7. Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar. Preceded hypertext by about 20 years. This was an amazing book that allowed the reader, at the end of each chapter, to “hop” to a different chapter in order to follow different story lines. I felt like a participant in creating the story.

8. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Made me realize two things. One, books that everyone seemed to think were amazing could, indeed, be amazing. Two, a person could create fiction that transported the reader from places that seemed so ordinary. (I grew up in Northern California and wouldn’t have believed at the time that it could be a source of great fiction.)

9. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. This book actually made me think that I understood what it was like to be black. Now that's a work of fiction.

10. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. I was left bedazzled by the way that Pynchon played with ideas and perhaps first realized, when reading this, that I was an idea junkie.

11. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. Science and fiction – not just science fiction. I got the sense that Asimov was actually trying out scientific ideas under the guise of telling a story. It changed how I thought one could use fiction.

12. Sosha by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The first half was transcendent. The second half was merely great. It made me feel like I knew something about romantic love (an illusion) and being Jewish during the horror of the holocaust (another illusion). At his best, Singer was an illusionist.
13. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. If Burroughs was one of the first authors I remember reading as a teen, Faulkner is one of the last. (What a lot of changes between 12 and 20, no?) This wasn’t just an amazing story. It was a lesson in how radically truth could change as one changed perspectives, which I suppose is the lesson of all great fiction.