Category Archives: Books

READING REPORT: May 1, 2015

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Becomingbatman

Most of my reading time this week was divided between two books, one of which was also a new purchase. The newly purchased book that I spent a lot of time with is E. Paul Zehr’s Becoming Batman. This book isn’t at all what one might expect from the title or the cover. If one were to notice that it’s put out by Johns Hopkins University Press, one might realize that it’s not a fanboy fantasy work. What it is is a book about the science of exercise and conditioning for athletes that uses “Batman” as a pedagogic tool to make more digestible scientific information like how our muscles grow or how we make our movement more efficient through practice. It’s a fascinating book if you are interested in science and martial arts (or movement arts more generally.)

 

Wired for StoryThe other book I’ve been tearing through is Wired for Story, which I wrote about last week. It’s a book that explains how human brains are wired to be intrigued by story, and how writers can put this information to good use.

 

Meeting the Dog Girls

The one book that I finished this week is Gay Terry’s Meeting the Dog Girls. This is a collection of short stories (some of which might be classified as flash fiction) that could be called tales of the weird or supernatural fiction. Most of the stories have a quirky sense of humor.

 

ZebrasUlcers_Sapolsky

I bought two other books this week, both of which have been on my reading list for a while. The first is Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, by Robert Sapolsky.  As the title suggests, this book is about why humans are unique within the animal kingdom with respect to stress-induced illnesses. Stress reduction and mitigation have been an important question of inquiry for me as of late.

 

afterdark_murakami

The other book is Haruki Murakami’s After Dark. This will be the third or fourth book by Murakami I’ve read, and I enjoy his style. Ironically, this was the first book by Murakami that I noticed in the bookstore, but I never got around to reading it.

BOOK REVIEW: Free Will by Sam Harris

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Free WillFree Will by Sam Harris

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Amazon page

I had high hopes for Sam Harris’s book Free Will, but they didn’t pan out. It’s a very short book (less than 100 pages) on the subject of free will–or the lack thereof. While I’m normally a huge fan of brevity and conciseness, Harris could have put some more pages to good use. My two principal complaints regard the lack of information: a. substantiating the notion that free will is always and everywhere an illusion as Harris asserts; b. suggesting what logic is at the root of decision if our conscious thoughts are irrelevant. (If they were random synaptic firings our behavior wouldn’t be nearly so consistent. Self-preservation of genes? The hand of god? You won’t know from this book.)

Harris might claim that that’s not the purpose of this book, that one should familiarize oneself with the vast literature on the topic before getting to this book. In that case, my complaints remain two-fold. First, he shouldn’t take on such a bold and presumptuous title as Free Will (no subtitle) if he’s not going to educate us from the ground up on the titular topic. Second, if the reader has done all the scholarly reading on the subject, why should we care about Harris’s opinions?

I will say that if you liked Matrix Revolutions, the third Matrix movie, you will love this book. SPOILER: In that movie, we find out that Neo is the central element of an elaborate plan to fool people into thinking they have some control over their own lives. In Harris’s book, Neo is replaced by the conscious mind.

There’s a scientific literature supporting the notion that free will is an illusion–though Harris only touches on it. This conclusion has been reached by observing that subconscious parts of the brain involved with decision-making light up well in advance of the conscious parts of the brain. [On a note unrelated to the book: we also know that individuals with damage to the emotional centers in the brain become unable to make decisions because all options hold the same weight.] The most illuminating example offered is an experiment in which participants were asked to press a button to select a letter or number of their choosing from among a string of changing letters / numbers. Some subjects felt the scientists had mastered precognition (a class III impossibility according to physicists–i.e. impossible according to the laws of physics as we know them.) What was really happening was an exploitation of the lag between when the individual’s subconscious decided and when their consciousness became aware of their decision.

Harris briefly mentions a couple of these neuroscience experiments, but then expects that the reader will treat the free will illusion as law. That is, we are to accept that always and everywhere people’s subconscious minds decide some measure before their conscious minds. Maybe there has been a broad enough scientific investigation of the topic to safely conclude that free will is always and everywhere an illusion–but Harris does make this point.

Harris tells us about couple of studies in which, a.) there’s no cost differential between the different options; (i.e. is it possible that the mind treats decisions about picking a spouse or a house differently than picking a letter or number for which there is no objectively better or worse option?) b.) those studied are a random sample of individuals who have no particular expertise with their minds—probably mostly college undergrads. (If I drew a random sample of people and asked each to lift 300 lbs over his or her head. If no one could do it, would I be safe in concluding that lifting 300 lbs was something forever beyond the capacity of every member of the human race? In other words, what if exercising conscious control over decision-making requires training and expertise with the mind.)

There are a couple of red-flags for me about Harris’s approach to the subject. First, Harris scoffs at the suggestion that it might be that the conscious can overrule the subconscious, and seems to deem this as unworthy of study because it would just be the subconscious making a second decision instead of the conscious truly vetoing. Anytime a scholar is dismissive of another scholar’s attempts to further probe into a question signals that a pet theory has become a sacred cow.

Second, Harris suggests that anyone who truly studied his own mind in action couldn’t help but realize the fallacy of free will. People who can’t imagine that others see the world differently than them are also a point of concern when it comes to getting sound information. Could it possibly surprise Mr. Harris to learn that there are people who’ve spent far more time alone with their minds than he, who’ve concluded quite the opposite?

Alright, I may have overstated Harris’s position when I suggested the conscious mind is relegated to a Matrix Revolutions-style (and Rube Goldberg-esque) machine for tricking us into thinking we have choice and control over the direction of our lives. I suspect Harris would agree that evolution doesn’t over-engineer, and a conscious mind that is just part of a trick would be the vastest act of over-engineering in the history of the universe. (Unless the universe is a hologram, as some physicists are now suggesting–presumably based on the notion that their math works out in 2-D.)

I just don’t have a good idea of what purpose Harris thinks the conscious mind serves. His central point seems to be that we still need to keep putting rapists and murders in jail so they can be kept off the streets. We just shouldn’t bear any ill-will toward them because they had no control over their decisions. However, if we set a tone with our conscious thought stream, then whether the individual’s decision to act was conscious or not they would have culpability by virtue of stage-setting. If we don’t have any control over our conscious thought stream then there would be no benefit to courses of study that help one improve one’s state of mind, but there’s also a scientific literature showing that people who begin meditative practices, yoga, and the like do see tangible positive changes. (Not to mention that Harris should give all the money back for the books he has sold about meditation, i.e. Waking Up.) If we have conscious control of our thought stream, but that thought stream is irrelevant, then we should be walking around in a constantly perplexed state.

To add to the confusion, Harris uses the term “choices” to refer to his “decisions,” but according to his paper he doesn’t make any choices. He—like all of us—are slaves to some unknown–or at least unexplained–process. Black boxes aren’t persuasive.

I can’t say I’d recommend this book, unless you’ve read extensively on the topic and are rounding out your reading experience. This book isn’t the ideal starting point for engaging this subject—as it seems when you are reading the blurb–because you’re as likely to come away more confused than when you began reading.

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BOOK REVIEW: Gotham Writers’ Workshop: Writing Fiction by Various

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Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York's Acclaimed Creative Writing SchoolWriting Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School by Alexander Steele

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amazon page

This workbook-style guide to writing fiction is put out by the well-known New York City creative writing school. With 11 chapters, it delivers lessons on all the elements of fiction including: character development, plotting, establishing point of view, honing description, building realistic dialogue, varying pacing, establishing voice, determining a work’s theme, and carrying out revisions. It also has a chapter that goes into the business of writing (as opposed to the craft of writing which is the bailiwick of the first ten chapters.)

There are a couple of features of this book that set it apart from the vast canon of writers’ guides. First, this isn’t a single author work, which means the reader has access to a much broader pool of experience than one would in a single author text. It also means that an author can be assigned a topic according to his or her strengths as a writer.

Second, across the chapters, they use Raymond Carver’s Cathedral as an example work, and they provide that story in an appendix for those who haven’t read it. It’s not that the authors exclusively use this short story for examples. But it’s useful to have a common story and to include it because there are so many great stories and novels available that no matter how well-read one’s readership, there will be works that some haven’t read. (e.g. Much as I should’ve, I haven’t yet read nor seen the movie Gone with the Wind–a common exemplary work because it’s a beloved book, a movie, and because pop culture references [e.g. The Simpsons] have made the gist of it available to even those slackers who’ve neither read the book nor seen the movie.) There’s a reason why writers’ book authors often use movies to describe story elements, because there are many fewer movies than books and vastly fewer good movies—thus a higher likelihood of a common experience. Yes, there are a few works common across most school curricula, but there’s no better way to ensure that a book doesn’t get read thoroughly than to assign it as required reading.

A third useful feature of this book–but not one that is in any way unique to it–is that it offers writing exercises throughout to help build one’s skills through practice. This is where the value of such a book truly lies. The advice such books offer are almost always the same—sometimes hackneyed but almost always valuable. (A lot of tired advice is tired because it bears repeating owing to the constant infusion of new writers who repeat the same errors.) A final useful element of the book—but also one that features in many similar guides—is a checklist in the appendices that allows one to rapidly consider the book’s key questions as they apply to one’s own writing project.

I’d recommend this book as one of the most useful writers’ guides that I’ve read.

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READING REVIEW: April 24, 2015

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I completed three books this week. The first was Richard Wiseman’s Night School. I wrote a lot about this book in my last Reading Report. Night School examines what happens when we sleep, what happens when we don’t, and a host of events that happen in and around our sleeping life (i.e. nightmares, night terrors, sleep walking, etc.)  The notion that dreams and nightmares are our subconscious working out waking life problems is well established, but there was some interesting discussion of how to change one’s dreamscape (i.e. lucid dreaming) that was fascinating.

NightSchool

 

 

The second book I finished was Sam Harris’s Free Will. I had high hopes for this book, but they didn’t pan out.   It’s a very short book (less than 100 pages) on the subject of free will–or the lack thereof. There’s a well-established scientific literature supporting the notion that free will is an illusion. This conclusion was reached by observing that subconscious parts of the brain involved with decision-making light up well in advance of the conscious parts of the brain. The most illuminating example offered is an experiment in which participants were asked to press a button to select a letter or number of their choosing from among a string of rotating letters / numbers. Some subjects became convinced that the scientists had mastered precognition (a class III impossibility according to physicists–i.e. impossible according to the laws of physics as we know them.)  What was really happening was an exploitation of the lag between when the individual’s subconscious decided and when they became aware of their decision.

While I’m normally a big fan of brevity, Harris could have put some more pages to good use. First, he barely mentions a couple of the neuroscience experiments, and expects that the reader will treat this all as law. That is, we are to accept that always and everywhere people’s subconscious minds decide some measure before their conscious minds. Harris also scoffs at the suggestion that perhaps the conscious can overrule the subconscious. He seems to deem this as not worthy of study because it would just be the subconscious making a second decision. So we learn about a couple of studies in which a.) the decision-maker has no stake in the decision (is it possible the mind treats decisions about picking a spouse or a house differently than picking a letter or number in which there is no more costly outcome?) b.) those studied are a random sample of individuals who have no particular expertise with their minds. (If I drew a random sample of people and asked each to lift 300 lbs over his or her head. If no one could do it, would I be safe in concluding that lifting 300 lbs was something forever beyond the capacity of every member of the human race? In other words, what if exercising conscious control over decision-making requires training and expertise with the mind.) Maybe all of this has been studied (e.g. high stakes cases and cases with monks and meditators), and we can safely conclude that free will is always and everywhere an illusion–but Harris didn’t make this point. He concludes we will take it as a given just as he has. (Much like he suggests that anyone who truly studied their mind would understand this point already. Would it surprise Mr. Harris to learn that there are people who have spent far longer alone with their minds than he, who have concluded quite the opposite?)

Second, if the conscious mind is just a Matrix Revolutions-style (and Rube Goldberg-style) machine for tricking us into thinking we have choice and control over the direction of our lives (what happened to evolution not over-engineering?), what guides all of these “decisions?” Given that they produce, I might point out, a fairly orderly world. Harris doesn’t answer this. One might guess that he would point to Dawkinesque suggestion that it’s all about genes advancing their own agenda. (A proposition that seems to me has trouble explaining a corporeal who throws himself on a grenade to save his comrades.) I shouldn’t put words in the author’s mouth. Quite frankly, I have no idea whether he believes there are rules or some guide to these subconscious decisions, because he doesn’t tell us. (Maybe he thinks they are random neuronal firings, but I doubt it.) From what I’ve heard of his other books, he doesn’t think it’s a god making these decisions–a sentiment I share. However, there must be something underlying these decisions, and an author writing about this topic should at least make some effort to address it. Black boxes aren’t persuasive.

FreeWill

 

The final book I finished this week is entitled The Sensual Body. This is a book that discusses a number of systems of movement and bodily activity as means to increase bodily awareness. Among the systems included are Tai chi, Eutony, Kum Nye, running, Aikido, and massage. It’s an interesting overview, but without sufficient detail of anything in particular to be of practical value. It’s the kind of book one might read to see what kind of classes one should take or what more focused books would be of benefit.

 

Besides the aforementioned books, I spent most of my reading time on two books that look at two very different subjects from the viewpoint of neuroscience. The first is Wired for Story, and it’s a how-to book for writers that sets itself apart by explaining how humans are hardwired by evolution to love stories. Just as a few notes produce an infinite variety of music. There is an inherent limiting / shaping structure to stories that is ignored at the writer’s peril. Much of the advice offered isn’t that different from other books on writing or storytelling, but one gets insight into which advice one should really treat as inviolable because it touches upon something fundamental to our human nature.

 

 


Wired for Story

 

The other book is the only book I purchased this week. It’s entitled Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control and is by Kathleen Taylor. So far the book is intriguing. The chapters I’ve read so far provide an overview of brainwashing and cults. The middle section of the book delves into the neuroscience behind brainwashing, and the final section gets into practical matters such as how one can make oneself resistant to thought control techniques.

 

Brainwashing_Taylor

 

BOOK REVIEW: The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates by Xenophon

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The Memorable Thoughts of SocratesThe Memorable Thoughts of Socrates by Xenophon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amazon page

 

Xenophon gives us an alternative to Plato’s accounts of the lessons of Socrates. As you probably know if you are reading this, Socrates left nothing behind by way of written teachings. All we know of the great philosopher’s teachings come from the accounts of his students. Xenophon’s version (Memorabilia of Socrates) is stylistically different from Plato’s dialogues(e.g. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo), though Socrates’ wisdom and method (questioning) remain consistent.

I enjoyed Plato’s dialogues on the last days of Socrates more than Xenophon’s Memorabilia. This owes to Plato’s narrative approach, which tells us the story of Socrates’ trial, conviction, and execution. Philosophy is more palatable embedded in a story. However, all of these works (Xenophon’s and Plato’s) are short, readable translations, and so it is worth reading all of them to get a broader access to the thoughts of Socrates.

As with Apology, Xenophon conveys Socrates thoughts on piety and corruption of the youth (these were the charges raised against Socrates that resulted in his hemlock sentence.) Socrates maintained that he was pious, but he did think it a weakness to trouble the gods with questions that men should be able to solve for themselves. His emphasis on self-reliance and fortitude is part of why we so respect Socrates. One sees the imprint of Socrates on the school of Stoicism that would come later. In Memorabilia, Socrates openly mocks those men who cannot bear adversity as well as their slaves. (Yes, Socrates wasn’t so infallibly wise as to see the folly of slavery. I no more advocate paleomania [irrational exuberance for old thinkers / ideas] than I do neomania [irrational exuberance for new ideas.] Still, people live in the context of their times, and if one expects a person to be ahead of their time in all aspects, one will be disappointed.)

Socrates discusses governance and politics frequently in this volume. To a large extent, this is by way of trying to convince men that he believed would be good for governance to participate, and convincing those who he believed wouldn’t be effective leaders (e.g. Euthydemus) not to participate. Toward the end of book (part IV) he talks about the various forms of government (e.g. Monarchy, Aristocracy, Plutocracy, Tyranny, and Democracy.) These ideas no doubt informed Plato’s illumination of eight forms of government in The Republic.

What I appreciate most about Socrates was his groundedness and appreciation of the importance of the body. One can read a lot of philosophy without hearing mention of the body (beyond the thought that it might be an illusion created by the program that runs our brain-in-a-vat system.) One gets the idea that proponents of this discipline largely think of the body as a cart that drags around their great, big, lovely brains. Not so with Socrates. In fact, he rebukes philosophers for not taking care of themselves. He mentions the importance of nutrition, exercise, and sleep [this is where he’s ahead of his time.] Also, Socrates recognizes the damage done by having too great an attachment to comfort. (Here one sees an interest point of overlap with Eastern philosophies that derive from yoga–with its niyama of tapas [austerity and self-discipline.] By the way, that isn’t the only correlation between the Eastern and Western mindset we see in Socrates. e.g. At one point, a wealthy man complains about the poor behavior of his servant, to which Socrates asks upon whom this condition should reflect poorly—the master not the servant. Confucius made a similar statement to this one.)

I think this classic is well worth reading. It’s short, readable, and offers a great deal of food for thought. If you don’t have time for multiple accounts of Socrates’ teachings, you might be kept more enthralled by the Platonic dialogues, but surely you can make time for Socrates.

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READING REPORT: April 17, 2015

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This wasn’t a big week for reading, but I’ve completed about 60% of a book by Richard Wiseman entitled Night School: Wake up to the power of sleep. (I may or may not finish it over the weekend.) This book examines topics such as sleep deprivation, sleepwalking, dreams, nightmares, night terrors, and the power and purpose of sleep. I like that this book crosses boundaries. There are a number of dry self-help books to teach one about how to sleep. There are also a number of creative nonfiction books with fascinating historical and scientific tidbits about sleep, but which have no practical implications beyond providing some intriguing cocktail party banter.  This book crosses streams to good effect. It also helps keep one’s attention by using the “night school” premise to interactive ends. There are little quizzes along the way that serve as summaries and encourage one to retain key information.

NightSchool

 

I only bought one book this week, and that was a short, technical book by Loren Fishman M.D. entitled Pain in the Butt: Piriformis Syndrome: Diagnosis, Treatment, and Yoga.  Fishman is a medical doctor who uses yoga therapeutically–primarily for musculoskeletal afflictions like back pain, scoliosis, plantar fasciitis, arthritis, and–obviously–piriformis syndrome.

PainInTheButt

 

 

That’s all for this week. I hope to have more to mention next week.

 

BOOK REVIEW: The Painted Word by Phil Cousineau

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The Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their OriginsThe Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their Origins by Phil Cousineau

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amazon page

The Painted Word is a collection of interesting words with definitions, insight into each word’s origins and evolution, and interesting or humorous usages. These aren’t all GRE words (massive and mostly useless words that have little value beyond impressing admissions committees.) Many of the words will be familiar to readers without huge vocabularies. On the other hand, there will be words that are new to even New York Times crossword puzzle solvers.

As the title suggests, there’s a little bit of an art-related theme. However, I’m not sure I would have noticed this if it hadn’t been for the title. There are a number of colors included among the words—colors known mostly to interior decorators and not to most heterosexual men. There are also a few artistic styles (e.g. intimism.) However, the bulk of the words aren’t clearly related to the fine arts. Many of the entries are loan words, i.e. words that have been used in English literature or other English-language media but which are of foreign origin.

I’ll include a few of the words that captured my own interest:

Autologophagist: one who eats his / her own words
Bafflegab: language that misleads—intentionally or not
Cataphile: a lover of catacomb crawling
Inkhorn: an over-intellectualized word
Lambent: shining with soft light on the surface of something
Millihelen: the amount of beauty that would result in the launch of a single ship.
Monogashi [Japanese]: the sigh or sadness of things
Sonicky: A great sounding word—coined by Roy Blount Jr.
Oculogyric: eye-rolling
Phlug: belly-button lint
Snollygoster: a shrewd but corrupt politician
Ubantu [Bantu / Xhosa]: the interconnectedness of all things

This book is full of fun insights and statements. I learned that “hush puppies” were literally carried to throw to noisy dogs to get them to stop barking. There are many interesting and humorous quotes. For example, Brendan Behan said, “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.” Brief vignettes are used to help give depth of understanding to words. One such story is about a Luddite looking upon the operation of a steam shovel who said to his friend, “Were it not for that steam shovel, there would be work for hundreds of men with shovels…” to which his friend replied, “or thousands of men with teaspoons.”

I enjoyed this book. You don’t have to be fascinated by the minutiae of semantics to find it readable and interesting. It’s not as much like reading a dictionary as one might suspect.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Wit and Wisdom of Master Yoda by Yoda

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The Wit and Wisdom of Master Yoda: Master Yoda QuotesThe Wit and Wisdom of Master Yoda: Master Yoda Quotes by Yoda

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

[I normally put a link here to the books I review, but wouldn’t want anyone to accidentally buy this one by mistake.]

This review is the same rant I put in my weekly reading review today. If you saw it there, don’t bother reading onward.

This book was a stinker, and I can’t recommend it for anyone–though its saving grace is that it’s slim and thus only wastes a tiny bit of one’s time. What the author apparently did was to watch a Star Wars movie marathon and pull every Yoda line out and collect them together. This is a sad effort in two ways. First, while Yoda isn’t a lead in the movies (and, therefore, has a limited number of lines), there’s a vast canon of Star Wars books, and it doesn’t look like the author trolled any of them for quotes. Second, some of the lines are neither witty nor wise. Occasionally, Yoda has a line equivalent to, “take a left at the second light,” and the author includes such banal quotes. Furthermore, some of the quotes appear a second time in either reduced or extended form. Beyond all these complaints, the author doesn’t even take the time to put together meaningful front matter to tell the reader something interesting that they don’t already know, and thus doesn’t establish his worth in producing such a book. (Also, he doesn’t seem to know accepted protocol for writing quotes inside quotes–i.e. use of single quotes. Which I guess means he probably didn’t just cut and paste all the quotes because then they would have been grammatically correct.) He also could have at least provided told us which movie each quote was from. It’s a lazy effort. It succeeds spectacularly in being lazy. If you’ve seen the movies (or have basic cable so that you can readily do so by way of one of the frequent Star Wars marathons) you’ll gain nothing from this book.

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READING REPORT: April 10, 2015

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Ikkyu_Berg

I finished four books this week. That makes it sound like a big reading week, but two of the books were tiny and I was well into the other two at the start of the week. I will present them in the order in which I enjoyed them because they hit the great, the middling, and the awful. The best was Ikkyu: Crow With No Mouth, which is a poetry collection by an irreverent 15th century Zen monk. Given that this is a collection of Japanese short form poetry, you may have guessed that it’s one of the short books (as opposed to one that was half read.) [Full disclosure: some will find a few of the poems vulgar, and it’s probably not a collection you want your kids reading until they are of suitable age for graphic sexual description.] Among my favorite verses are:

you can’t make cherry blossoms by tearing off petals

to plant only spring does that

 

and

it’s logical: if you’re not going anywhere

any road is the right one

and

I live in a shack on the edge of whorehouse row

me autumn a single candle

or

the edges of the sword are life and death

no one knows which is which

 

HaikuHandbook

(Yes, I’m on a bit of a haiku kick lately. With my RCYT training in progress, I haven’t had a lot of time for more extensive reading or writing lately.) Unlike the previous book, this book on Haiku isn’t a poetry collection–though it does assemble a lot of great haiku, tanka, renga, and haibun as examples. However, this book is–as its subtitle suggests–about writing, sharing, and teaching haiku and related poetic forms. The book teaches one that five-seven-five syllable organization isn’t an essential element haiku,  but rather it should be considered the most readily abandoned and superficial aspect of this form. However, beyond teaching one what one really needs to know to construct haiku, the book offers a lesson plan for teaching haiku to school children and tells us how this Japanese poetry form went global.

 

Elements of fiction writing conflict & suspenseElements of Fiction Writing: Conflict & Suspense is my second read by Bell on writing. The first one was on plotting and structure. That first book must have been useful enough to get me to read a second. This book is divided in two parts, the first one on conflict and the second on suspense. (The first is much longer.)  In both cases, the chapters examine how the various elements of fiction (i.e. setting, plot, character, dialogue, etc.) can contribute to creating the much-needed characteristics of conflict and suspense. Bell uses a lot of example text to illustrate his points (mostly–but not exclusively–from commercial fiction), and this is a valuable feature of his guides.

 

wit&wisdom_yoda

This book was a stinker, and I can’t recommend it for anyone–though its saving grace is that it’s slim and thus only wastes a tiny bit of one’s time. What the author apparently did was to watch a Star Wars movie marathon and pull every Yoda line out and collect them together. This is a sad effort in two ways. First, while Yoda isn’t a lead in the movies (and, therefore, has a limited number of lines), there’s a vast canon of Star Wars books, and it doesn’t look like the author trolled any of them for quotes. Second, some of the lines are neither witty nor wise. Occasionally, Yoda has a line equivalent to, “take a left at the second light,” and the author includes such banal quotes. Furthermore, some of the quotes appear a second time in either reduced or extended form. Beyond all these complaints, the author doesn’t even take the time to put together meaningful front matter to tell the reader something interesting that they don’t already know, and thus doesn’t establish his worth in producing such a book. (Also, he doesn’t seem to know accepted protocol for writing quotes inside quotes–i.e. use of single quotes. Which I guess means he probably didn’t just cut and paste all the quotes because then they would have been grammatically correct.) He also could have at least provided told us which movie each quote was from. It’s a lazy effort. It succeeds spectacularly in being lazy.  If you’ve seen the movies (or have basic cable so that you can readily do so by way of one of the frequent Star Wars marathons) you’ll gain nothing from this book.

 

I bought three books during this week, but one of them was the aforementioned Yoda crapfest. On the other hand, one of these books I have high hopes for being both fascinated and educated by, and that’s Wired for Story. This book is about how our brains are evolutionarily optimized to the narrative form, and how one can use this fact to one’s advantage as a constructor of stories.

Wired for Story

The second book was a poetry collection that is on sale on Amazon entitled Love Alone. I must admit that I picked this book to meet one of my remaining requirements in the 2015 Book Riot Read Harder Challenge–nevertheless I have high hopes for this work.

LoveAlone

 

READING REPORT: April 3, 2015

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I finished two books this week. The first was the Gotham Writers’ Workshop guide to writing fiction. This book offers advice on the key elements of fiction writing including character, point of view, setting, pacing, description, plot, revisions, and marketing one’s work. It includes exercise prompts throughout, and is set up as a workbook. It’s written by a number of contributing authors, and offers a broader experience than a single author book.

GWW_WritingFiction

 

 

The second book I finished was The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates. This is a book first published before 1850, and puts me more than half way through the 24 tasks of Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge. (Yes, this may be a cheat as the translation was first published in 1889, but I’m sticking to my story.) I read about two-thirds of this book a while back, but just got around to finishing it off. I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, but it’s still full of thought-provoking ideas. (How bad could Socrates be?)

MemorableThoughtsofSocrates_Xenophon

 

Besides the books I completed, I finished off a couple of chapters [and part 2 (of 4)] of William J. Higginson’s The Haiku Handbook. This book’s subtitle, “How to write, share, and teach haiku,” says it all. If you think that the essential feature of haiku is that it occurs in three lines of 5 – 7- 5 syllables, then you could learn a lot from this book. It turns out that there’s much more to the traditional form (e.g. seasonal focus, nature observation without analysis, etc.) than syllable count. Furthermore, it’s argued that the 5 – 7 -5 isn’t the optimal way of emulating the Japanese form in English (because English syllables average longer than Japanese syllables.)

HaikuHandbook

 

I resumed reading another book for writers that I started back around the time I began the Gotham Writers’ Workshop book. This one is James Scott Bell’s Elements of Writing Fiction – Conflict and Suspense. I read another book on plotting and structure by Bell that was probably in the same series, and it wasn’t bad. I’m about half way through and found some worthwhile nuggets among a field of self-evident info.

Elements of fiction writing conflict & suspense

 

I purchased two books this week–both were on sale. The first was The Backpacker’s Handbook, 4th Ed. As I prepare to do some trekking in the Himalayas this summer, I’m hoping to glean some tips that will save me some pain. I’ve read a number of such books in the past, but it’s been a while and my memory degrades.

BackpackersHandbook

 

 

 

The other book was Robert Silverberg’s Kingdoms of the Wall. As Silverberg is an icon of science fiction, but I haven’t read any of his novels, I figured that it would be good to do so–especially on sale.

Kingdoms of the Wall

 

That’s it for this week.