The Tapeworm's Turn

2011-12-05T23:57:00.000-08:00

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
(David Sedaris, 3 hours)
Light, not fluffy, but still fun to fool about with.

2011-12-04T23:59:00.000-08:00

Pedro Almodóvar Masters of Cinema
(Thomas Sotinel, 104pp)
I loved early Almodovar, and this little book taught me much I'd not known of his life, starting back to his La Mancha roots, with a father who worked as a mule driver. I lived in Madrid when he was making La Movida, but I totally missed out on this scene until I came back to live in Boston, and fell into the thrall of Matador & Law of Desire. After Women on the Verge, which most consider his breakout, I lost my affection for him.

2011-12-01T23:03:00.000-08:00

Steve Jobs
(Walter Isaacson, 24:55)
Necessary to read, but the writing is only at the snuff of a first draft. Occasional infelicities (a weird metaphor using pirouette, e.g.) drove home that Isaacson rushed this out. The raw material is of great interest, even though it's clear that Jobs is not a template for anyone else to emulate. Perhaps it's relevant if you are a handsome, clever sociopath who successfully vampires the talent of an engineering prodigy, enabling you to kickstart a revolution as torrential as the PC industry. Once that's accomplished, consider starting a NeXT-like hardware company to educate you more deeply about supply chains and object-oriented software. Flirt with becoming a movie mogul by picking up Pixar. Typically, Isaacson's account of how Jobs managed to get ownership from George Lucas is less interesting than other stories I've read. Notwithstanding the book's unhindered access to Jobs' personal life, readers will get very little sense of how he related to others as friends, as a husband, as a father, or even as a boss. Very little texture gets captured, even when the stories brim with incident. As one final proof of the book's slipshod construction, Jobs is reported to have had a girlfriend named Jennifer Egan, who argued with him that his Buddhist beliefs conflicted with his devotion to crafting objects of such covetable allure. Isaacson never mentions that this is the same Ms. Egan, at a much earlier stage of her life, who went on to win a Pulitzer for A Visit from the Goon Squad.

2011-11-30T22:25:00.000-08:00

The 4-Hour Body
(Tim Ferriss, 592pp - read about 350)
This is a big book, about how to bulk up, slim down, & then, because you'll still be hideously deformed by soulless ambition, you can also bone up on inflicting orgasms on women to bribe them to be objects in your life. In spite of Ferriss's psychopathy, narcissism, and near humorlessness, the robot sure can munge up a boatload of information. Although it is too fat to hide behind a respectable brown wrapper, I did sneak peek through much of the book. There's lots of ideas, and surely some of them are not rubbish.

2011-11-26T21:15:00.000-08:00

It chooses you
(Miranda July, 224pp)
As a performance art project, running around LA interviewing people selling their junk does make the social scientist inside me think, "Why didn't I think of that?" It's a pleasure to meet these people, through the gaze of Miranda July, whose prose offers so many charms and insights. The only reviewer on Amazon remarked on the way this book is a complement to her current film, The Future. I'm not convinced that it's necessary to know the film, although anyone who enjoys the sorts of things that Miranda July confects would not be wise to deny themselves the pleasure of seeing the film AND reading the book. The New Yorker excerpted several of these stories, which can be read as a pretty strong shot of support for seeing the words as capable of standing on their own. I bought this book on pre-order, but it took a while to find time to read it. Ms. July's power, for me, is her capacity to speak so openly about the fragile hopes and awkward moments of quavering inspiration. Snarky poseurs often peg her as "twee", but to me, she's straight up painfully authentic. In this book, she openly discusses her own creative process, in terms of the angst and self-doubt that share mind space with her bounty of ideas. I hadn't realized she recorded CDs until she offhandedly mentioned getting to know a shoe repairman (who was the model for the main character in her first feature film), to whom she gave a copy of 10 Million Hours A Mile.

2011-11-23T20:52:00.000-08:00

(un)FASHION
(Tibor & Maira Kalman, 224pp)
What a wonderful whirl. The photos are almost entirely stock, and there's next to nothing but pictures gleefully arranged to show the brio with which humans adorn themselves. Many of the most fascinating turn out to be from PG (Papua New Guinea), but there's delightful shots of people in all phases of life.

2011-11-21T20:54:00.000-08:00

Sacred Treasure: The Cairo Genizah
(Mark Glickman, 8:21)
A fascinating trove of documents, championed by Solomon Shechter after he was exposed to them in the late 1890s. This book is rather pedestrian in its exposition, and although I learned things, I was never once excited by the way ideas and history were framed.

2011-11-18T20:59:00.000-08:00

Inside the Apple: A streetwise history of NYC
(Michelle & James Nevius, 384pp)
A very enjoyable way to catch snippets of NYC history.

2011-11-16T20:56:00.000-08:00

Marriage Plot
(Jeffrey Eugenides, 1st chapter)
Meh. Double meh.

2011-11-14T20:49:00.000-08:00

The Better Angels of Our Nature
(Steven Pinker, 37+ hours)
Amazingly powerful thesis, demonstrated with great taste and power. I am relaxing a little about the fate of the world, now that Pinker's argued so clearly for embracing the process of civilizing impulses.

2011-11-02T21:03:00.000-07:00

What investors really want : discover what drives investor behavior and make smarter financial decisions
(Meir Statman, 286pp)
A pretty good tour of the literature of behavioral finance. Statman's very clear about the non-financial reasons people get involved in investing. Not nearly as indispensable as Poundstone's Priceless -- I just tried to link to my review of that book, but discovered it was never written up. Priceless was very interesting, full of details that I'd not known before. This book is better organized, but not as penetrating.

2011-10-29T22:54:00.000-07:00

Quantum Man
(Lawrence Krauss, 9:32)
Great, gritty, detailed account of Feynman's physics. Instead of elaborating the tales that Feynman himself spun, Krauss discusses how hard he worked, how devoted he was to building up physics in his own style, and how frequently his informal approach caused him to stop once he understood an idea, even though it ended up being another physicist that proved his hunch. At the same time, there's several people who criticize Feynman for being so addicted to being original that he ended up being marginalized. It's a great pleasure just to hear of how his mind wended through the years. (I hadn't realized that his sister also was a physicist.)

2011-10-27T13:28:00.000-07:00

In the Plex
(Steven Levy, 19:58)
Levy had amazing access, and I've wanted to read this since he spoke at the Hillside about this right when it came out in April. The most interesting secrets unveiled: 1- Details on the scanning mechanism used in the Google books; apparently, their scanners use 3 lenses, so that the books needn't be flattened. 2- The intrigue behind the years Google spent in China, and their retreat upon being hacked by some arm of the Chinese government. 3- The revelation that neither Brin nor Page are gifted programmers. 4- The effort that Google has invested in building their data centers. Throughout, the record of their innovation (delivering great search results, granting gmail users 25GB of disk space, experimenting with open source Android & Chrome, trying to slay the orphan copyright gremlins) is a testament to the incredible intelligence of the founders. Some aspects of the Googly organization are not documented, e.g., whether Marissa Mayer's reign as the good witch Glenda of UX was in fact a distortion in the power structure. She was clearly a major source for Levy, and in the audible version, the book ends with an interview between Levy and Mayer.

2011-10-26T21:09:00.000-07:00

Practically painless English
(Sally Foster Wallace, 128pp)
This is a basic grammar exercise book, written by the mom of DFW. It's pretty sad. What kind of person wants to teach grammar? The kind of pedant who insists that you should never say "ain't." Oy. This sells for about $100 used on Amazon, for DFW groupies. It encapsulates the worst part of DFW's nerdy need to over-explain.

2011-10-24T20:01:00.000-07:00

60 Stories
(Donald Barthelme, 16:46)
I first listened to this 2 years ago, but I honestly could listen to this over and over. His stories repay endless attention and would surely be among my desert island library.

2011-10-22T13:21:00.000-07:00

The sacred sites bible : the definitive guide to spiritual places
(Anthony Taylor, 400pp)
This does not live up to its title. One of the most holy spaces I've ever directly experienced was Kyoto's Zen garden Ginkakuji. Other places that amazed me, but aren't listed here: the Bahai Temple in Wilmette (the book only lists one Bahai temple), and Maybeck's Christian Science Church in Berkeley. Listed, but probably only for purposes of political correctness, are sites like the Vatican & the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. I did admire the book's ability to let you travel from an armchair, and its method of organization is cogent and helpful. The photos from Tibet and Australia do transport the viewer to another realm.

2011-10-18T22:42:00.001-07:00

Game over : how Nintendo zapped an American Industry, captured your dollars, and enslaved your children
(David Sheff, 445pp)
I just skimmed this, but it's a little too dated to draw me in. The book was written when Japan was still an economic threat, and Steve Jobs was just a one-shot wonder. Nolan Bushnell streaks through as a maniac, but the rest of the story didn't compel me to read it in depth.

2011-10-13T22:40:00.000-07:00

Luka
(Salman Rushdie, 7:39)
Loved this. It reminded me of Grimus, the fantasy novel that was Rushdie's first. Great fun, whimsy, and an understated erudition. I don't recall loving Haroun, it's older brother prequel, as much. Maybe I'm just at the right stage to appreciate the genre of weaving mesmerizing stories for children.

2011-10-12T21:07:00.000-07:00

Creative space : urban homes of artists and innovators
(Francesca Gavin, 256pp)
Nothing of exquisite interest. The book was cobbled together via the author's social network, and bops from London to Berlin to Tokyo and such places. No eye opening spaces that inspire or even incite envy

2011-10-11T22:37:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on design
(Paul Rand, 95pp)
This was recommended by an interaction designer at the CCAC. But I found every design so ugly I couldn't believe how dated and irritating the examples were. I'm not a Randian, even of this design sort.

2011-10-03T22:49:00.000-07:00

Intelligent Investor
(Graham, 2:45)
Not worth scanning, in this abridged version, which dates to the mid-1970s. The book may be a classic, but when cut down to conclusions w/o the technical details of how the famous search for fundamentals works, it's too thin to feed on.

2011-09-30T22:48:00.000-07:00

Old Jews Telling Jokes
(Sam Hoffman with Eric Spiegelman, 240pp)
Better than the website, because it's much easier to skim. I mainly jumped toward the punchlines. I loved "Two Beggars in Rome" (p37) Also, Mom's Cooking (p135), 3 Old Jews (p199)

2011-09-27T23:30:00.000-07:00

Driving on the Rim
(Thomas McGuane, 2 out of 12:44)
Not the best of McGuane's work, but since it was read to me, for me, without me doing much effort, I gave this a spin. But the plot elements felt too tenuous to persist.

2011-09-25T21:13:00.000-07:00

How to shoot video that doesn't suck
(Steve Stockman, 256pp)
No way can I recommend this. It's all about staging and crafting an edited video, when what I wanted was an explanation of how to shoot spontaneous footage that will look more interesting. I just watched the video trailer on Amazon, and I'm making the head-smacking gesure right this second, because the 3 minute clip is more useful and engaging than the book was. The tips I wanted were highlighted in the video, when I found the book's tone and writing so off-putting that the message didn't sink in.

2011-09-22T23:58:00.000-07:00

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
(Rebecca Solnit, skimmed around but couldn't possess in totality)
Love this book, and then, upon poking around, realized how many of Ms. Solnit's books are treasures of the highest order. I've read some of "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster," and scanned "A Field Guide to Getting Lost." The SF Atlas is chock full of fascinating lenses on the city, and although she corralled others to write some of the chapters, it is a hugely fascinating work. Alas, it was called home to the library before I could finish it.

2011-09-20T13:07:00.001-07:00

A Visit from the Goon Squad
(Jennifer Egan, 5 hours out of 10)
Left me cold, and it took forever to get past the opening, about a klepto confessing to her shrink her lack of agency over the way she steals from friends and casual sex partners. I tried again, and did find the thread on the soul-less record producer a tad more involving, particularly when it spun back to the Mab Gardens in SF in the proto-punk '80s. But really, I'm no hipster zombie, and I just could not care about any of the people heaped up in this book.

2011-09-14T13:02:00.000-07:00

Where's My Jetpack?
(Daniel Wilson, 3:41)
Fun, quick tour of the nostalgia for the past's version of the future. Fine writing, about an interesting jumble of topics.

2011-09-10T12:59:00.000-07:00

The End of Overeating
(David Kessler, 7:00)
Appetizing is a technical term, as I learned here, for any food whose consumption leads to an increase in appetite. Paradoxically (but not really), listening to this book on how to regulate the power of food unleashed a real binge of hunger for me. Good ideas, but nothing profoundly original. Still, like Weight Watchers, it would help if the ideas were pursued.

2011-09-05T12:54:00.000-07:00

Superfreakonomics
(Dubner & Levitt, 7:04)
It took 2 years for this to reach me. This book is more annoying than its earlier version, and it's not just because they touched the third rail on climate by plumping for geo-engineering. The advocacy for ideas fostered by patent troll Nathan Myhrvold's ideas exposes how their contrarian approach leads to trayf proposals. I can't get mad about their interest in escorts' earnings, but I also don't find that their need for oppositional thinking leads to great insight.

2011-08-31T22:10:00.000-07:00

Wild Horses, Wild Dreams
(Lindy Hough, 301pp)
I bought this after falling into the long unpublished essay written by her husband, Richard Grossinger, on his very complex patrimony. Reading this book of poems was just a way to triangulate into the mysterious/moist/beckoning body of work of Lindy Hough's daughter, Miranda July. Miss July's emotionally raw, searching work, delicately expressed via maximally twee situations, is distinct from her father's open anxiety & energy, as it is also unlike her mother's light demotic poetry.

2011-08-26T22:11:00.000-07:00

Anton Chekhov - A life
(Donald Rayfield, paused after 2 hours)
Interesting to find out that Chekhov's bad grades would have barred him from ever working for Google. The remote world of tsarist Russia is explored inside the tortured family dynamics of Anton. I could imagine reading the whole of this very long biography, but it just seems too weird to spend more time on an author's biography than I have yet to spend on his oeuvre.

2011-08-23T22:21:00.000-07:00

The Nick Tosches reader
(Nick Tosches, 500pp, only skimmed)
Potent and interesting writer. The encounter he has with George Jones fascinated, and his reporting uncovers just how Klans-people inhabit the twon George grew up in. I didn't have time to read enough of this. I have an APB out on his "Country: The Twisted Roots Of Rock 'n' Roll."

2011-08-22T22:23:00.000-07:00

RadioLab podcasts
(Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich, 40+ hours)
I feel as if I can celebrate a siyyum, as I've just made it through the back log of RadioLab podcasts. The approach these guys take is often immensely rewarding, even when they're speaking on topics I'm familiar with. Favorites include: Words, Parasites, Stochasticity, The Ring and I, Stress.

2011-08-19T22:23:00.000-07:00

The Stuff of Thought
(Steven Pinker, 9:36)
Phenomenally lucid exposition of how language matters, and how the language of thought can be seen through cognitive science. Loved Pinker's description of Google as being in the business of selling noun phrases, and his wry observation that plurals appear to cost more than singular nouns. The book opens with the legal wrangling over the insurance of the World Trade Center, and the $3.5 billion question whether the attacks were one or two events. Every page shimmers with intelligence (and not nearly as jokey as his earlier compendium, How the Mind Works.) There's even an inscribed love note to his current partner, Rebecca Goldstein, when he mentions asking his new friend the meaning of "sidereal."

2011-08-16T16:35:00.000-07:00

Alice in Wonderland
(Lewis Carroll, read by Cory Doctorow)
Great fun, and a boon from the gift economy that Cory Doctorow participates in. He does a fine job narrating, and even sings the Lobster Quadrille.

2011-08-15T22:22:00.000-07:00

Pale King
(DFW, just read the end notes)
I carry no brief for the most prolix and self-indulgent of authors, one who I've continuously attended to, but whose verbal tics have repeatedly repelled me. I find it revealing that Jonathan Franzen, his best friend, believes that DFW killed himself at least partially as a career move. There was almost no chance I'd want to read a sustained instantiation of boredom. What I did enjoy were the notes on architecting the book, the little scribbles that could not themselves be spackled into a novelish editorial feat. In the notes to himself, DFW reveals a little more humanely the aims and plans he harbored.

2011-08-13T22:29:00.000-07:00

Confidence Man
(Herman Melville, 11 hours, stopped at 9)
This Librivox recording got me much further than I ever reached with the book on paper. The concept of a multifaceted faker has some rich veins, but it's also an oddment. The reader, mb, by the way, is quite gifted at conveying the hysteria and near panic in the text.

2011-08-11T22:42:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio
(Bob Dylan)
I've now listened to the first 30 of these, and there's so many ahead. It's quite surprising to learn how much he esteems Western Swing. Every episode is full of interesting angles, and it's a pleasure to discover that he's renewed his contract to churn out more. Bob Dylan could make these shows for the next 20 years, and not exhaust his profound knowledge of the wellsprings of music.

2011-08-09T22:34:00.000-07:00

San Francisco Then & Now
(Eric Kos, 144pp)
Interesting, although the pictures don't usually evoke a sense of surprise at the disparity. Even when it's clearly the same horizon and landscape, the change over time presents two different worlds, rather than making it seem as if one's discovered the hinge of destiny. Fun, and I did learn that Maxfield Parrish has a mural worth checking out in SOMA at the Palace Hotel.

2011-08-04T12:15:00.000-07:00

You must go & win
(Alina Simone, 244pp, skimmed)
I pre-ordered this, based on these two slender rationales: 1) Alina Simone is an amazing singer, emotional almost to the point of hysteria, whose velvet voice bursts with raw power; 2) the book publisher was the illustrious Farrar, Straus & Giroux, so it ought to be good. I now adduce that she may well have mesmerized an editor with her charismatic wiles. (Neil Gaiman blurbs the book as well, & again, knowing her personally may have caused him to not notice the words on the page.) Her prose is not at all distinguished, and as proof, let me just quote the dedication to her (experimental philosopher) spouse: "For Josh: I couldn't love you more if Jesus flew out of your mouth." I'll leave it to another hermenaut to find an intelligible way to parse that. Trust the song, not the singer....

2011-07-31T22:30:00.000-07:00

Tremble: Poems
(CD Wright, 60pp)
I've a friend who admires a different poet, last name Wright (James?), but I read through this trying to understand how this writer could have a real hook. For me, she didn't, but I did give it a try.

2011-07-27T22:12:00.000-07:00

Drive
(Daniel Pink, 5:47)
Somewhat skimpy, and yet it deserves to be read. As a grad student of Mark Lepper's, I'm amazed that both Alfie Kohn 20 years ago, and Pink today, have re-mined Mark's research (along with the work of Deci & Ryan) in a way that continues to astonish the business-y behaviorist types. This short book begins to repeat itself toward the end, when the "exercises" reprise ideas already (or just recently) covered, without much in the way of transformation, just repeated exhortation (e.g., Have FedEx days!).

2011-07-22T22:56:00.000-07:00

Unfamiliar Fishes
(Sara Vowell, 7:40, stopped after 4)
It's a crime that America hijacked the Hawaiian state. Up until this book, I've cheered on Ms Vowell's nerdy fascination with history. But, perhaps because I've never been to HI, this book fatigued me before I reached the end. I just couldn't care about the little state, even though her writing continues to encode loads of wry humor and wisdom.

2011-07-17T22:09:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan in America
(Sean Wilentz, 11:50)
I read half of this before, on paper, but it was a pleasure to revisit the entire work. I was persuaded this time to buy Blind Willy McTell (both the song by Dylan, and the oevre by the original bluesman).

2011-07-12T22:06:00.000-07:00

Little Brother
(Cory Doctorow, 11:54)
This was free from Sync, an audio community. The book is preferable to its alter ancestor, 1984, and has an energy and hopefulness that is synonymous with Cory Doctorow's unique voice.

2011-07-05T22:03:00.000-07:00

Founding Documents
Paine, Madison, Jefferson (1:54)
Interesting to listen to the original pretexts for the Declaration of Independence, as well as the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. Not as persuasive as I once found them, but they've taken a few body blows in the past decade or so (starting with Bush coup in Supreme Court).

2011-06-28T19:08:00.000-07:00

Joseph P Kennedy Presents
(Cari Beauchamp, 17:52)
An impressive personality, as well as a very driven Alpha male. The intensity of his drive to make money occasionally caused Joe Kennedy to be horrifically cavalier about the people he swindled. His attack on the film industry was brilliant: he posed as a banker, and he definitely knew accounting and finance better than any studio head. He then used his contacts at Harvard to craft a course in the Business School about the film industry, and used this platform to woo the big names he didn't already know. His accomplishments as a film-maker are not of lasting importance, although the sustained affair he had with Gloria Swanson does make for an eyebrow lifting adventure. From the moment he was appointed ambassador to Britain, and began espousing isolationist slogans, his life quality begins to stink. He definitely did an estimable job raising his first 3 sons, although Joe Jr. died in a war the father opposed, after which JFK took over. RFK is harder to judge, and surely no one can distinguish between Ted Kennedy and all the other weasels that have been in the family line since.

2011-06-20T19:15:00.000-07:00

Existentialism Kierkegaard Nietzsche Sartre
(Walter Kaufman, 3 hours)
The lecture on Kierkegaard is delightful. The 2nd, on Nietzsche, is less pungent, more even tempered, even though Kaufman was the superb translator of the entire body of Nietzsche's work. The third, on Sartre, reminds the listener that in the time of the 1960s, everyone really was talking about philosophy. Kaufman rightly points out the failure of authenticity as a basis for all morality, since one could clearly be an authentic racist, psychopath, or murderer. Irrelevantly, I also tacked on one of the lectures on Hegel by Leo Strauss, and his manner struck me as terribly pedantic.

2011-06-10T19:05:00.000-07:00

Free to Choose
(Milton Friedman, 12:16)
Written in 1980, this has aged quite well, even though it doesn't have any way of addressing the problems unleashed post-Prop 13. The advocacy for unregulated airways, as well as trucking and railroads, signally demonstrates where dereg can generate wealth. The fastidious attention to freedom, the very sensitive feeling about arbitrary constraints, has a particular poignancy as we decay into being forced to kowtow to ignoramuses in TSA or securitat positions. Very interesting, well worth thinking over with the dead little scrapper.

2011-05-10T16:11:00.000-07:00

Chemical History of a Candle
(Michael Faraday, 4:32)
Delightful, and free from librivox. Faraday was the genius dyslexic who invented field theory, which was later "mathematicized" by Maxwell. I wouldn't have supposed so much could be learned from acute attention to the phenomenology of burning. But then, Faraday explains things so concretely that one comes away fascinated by all that fire imparts.

2011-05-02T16:24:00.000-07:00

The Pregnant Widow
(Martin Amis, 14:09)
Took a year to go into this deeply enough to be drawn in. The 1970s aren't as interesting as the latter days. The moralistic streak of rage at the libertine spirit apparently traces to Amis's witnessing his sister destroy herself as a slatternly alcoholic. That would indeed be grim. Nicholas maps to Christopher Hitchens, and has some interesting behavior. My favorite line, clearly autobiographical, gives account of Keith as inhabiting the 'much-disputed territory between five-foot-six and five-foot-seven.'

2011-04-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
(Vladimir Nabokov, translated by his son Dmitri, 31:43)
This hasn't been as fun as I'd supposed. I've been gnawing on this for months. I still have 5 hours left. I was surprised that his early stories sound almost gothic (one is about an artist who can inhabit a painting). There's plenty of (deserved) grudges against the Soviets.

2011-04-12T16:14:00.000-07:00

How we decide
(Jonah Lehrer, 9:40)
Excellent discussion of decisionmaking. Initially, I was put off by the opening chapter, which discussed football quarterbacks, but once I made it over this hump, there was a trove of fascinating and incisive information. He's the anti-Gladwell, since rather than reach for the compelling analogy, he does the flat-footed work to understand the actual science.

2011-03-30T14:19:00.000-07:00

Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude
(Neal Pollack, 336pp)
I'm a fan of the man, and I also enjoyed reading this. But the book was sadder than I expected, since Pollack's trying to be his nicest self. His interpretation of what that entails has all but negated the sharp lampooning humor that first drew me to his work. As a self in progress, he documents his efforts to be wiser, more tolerant and compassionate. Larry Shainberg's Ambivalent Zen manages, while being super funny, to cover a deeper set of questions about spiritual ambition.

2011-03-27T14:28:00.000-07:00

Mindless Eating
(Brian Wansink, 6:26)
This is my second time reading this rewarding analysis of the behavioral cues that make us feel full or hungry. Get smaller plates now!

2011-03-20T14:13:00.000-07:00

My passion for design
(Barbra Streisand, 320pp - skimmed)
A joke book, really, that I picked up at the public library on my way to the Stanford d-school. Her sense of "design" is rather curatorial, basically buying pretty things and arranging them in her mausoleum homes.

2011-03-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

Born to Kvetch
(Michael Wex, 10:30)
I had a lot of data entry to do for tracking mishloach manot, and this was a delicious snack to revisit. A biography of a language lends itself to aleatoric jumps between passages.

2011-03-11T00:02:00.000-08:00

Living a Mythic Life
(Menachem Creditor, 5:19)
Not as muscular, and the audio quality is inferior, to Dynamic Judaism. Still, the themes engaged me entirely.

2011-03-08T23:56:00.000-08:00

Collected Ficciones
(Borges, 5:14)
Too skimpy, too many boring stories, but some gems as well. Many of my favorites were not included.

2011-03-01T23:57:00.000-08:00

How to Sell
(Clancy Martin, punted before 2 hours)
Written by a UMKC prof, and commented upon for its sneaky deployment of philosophy, this demonstrated that I need more hooks to hold onto a story about family jewelers

2011-02-22T16:41:00.000-08:00

36 Arguments for the Existence of God
(Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 15:34)
Good, but not great. I have spent a little too much time dallying with theology of late, but I couldn't resist this. Ms. Goldstein encodes roman a clef with intimate knowledge of academia. Her first book, the Body-Mind problem, played with Saul Kripke in an alternate universe. This starts with a pompous faker Jonas Elijah Klapper (surely based on Harold Bloom in his acts of ledgerdemain and self-arrogating disdain for science "after Freud.") Napoleon Chagnon is also shadow-sketched, as are others in the small world of giant egos in academia. The tale gets more engaging in the last half, since the focus on a child prodigy shows Ms. Goldstein's true reverence is for genius incarnate.

2011-02-16T16:38:00.000-08:00

Martha Stewart's Encyclopedia of Crafts
(Martha, 416pp)
Block potato printing, botanical pressing, French mats, decoupage, and soap making. Sound fun.

2011-02-07T16:33:00.000-08:00

Crowdsourcing: The Coming Big Bang of Business and How It Will Change Your World
(Jeff Howe, 9:44)
Very interesting although occasionally too rah-rah. The prose was more vigorous than Wikinomics, which I read at the same time, and the content overlapped about 75%. Of the two, this is a better book.

2011-02-05T16:36:00.000-08:00

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
(Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams, 13:40)
I read about 2/3 of this, but it's not quite as good as Crowdsourcing. It was published in 2007, rather than 2008 for the latter book.

2011-02-02T16:27:00.000-08:00

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
(The Heath brothers, 7:42)
Very smooth, very interesting. A little deceptive (or should I just say, Gladwellian) as it focuses on cases where hard behavioral changes can be facilitated by small tweaks. Certainly there are success stories to inspire, but there's an analogy to NP-hard problems: while it's easy to recognize their solution, it's very very difficult to find that solution, until you are presented with it. Loved the concept of 'action triggers', and I probably will start using the term "inch-pebbles" to build up "milestones." Here's a very cool map of the book

2011-01-30T16:18:00.000-08:00

Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger
(Laurence Leamer, 8:04)
Impossible to not find fascinating. Even Gray Davis admired Arnold for his capacity to subvert the political process. The discipline he exhibited in high jacking the election is well documented. Arnold's tagged as a butt-man who had to admit to inappropriate rough housing.

2011-01-28T16:12:00.000-08:00

Decameron
(Bocaccio, read by Frederick Davidson)
I only listened to 6 of the 30 hours, intoned by an inimitable old school narrator, the man of a half dozen audio-pseudonyms. The tales were occasionally quite funny, and the images pierce, in spite of the archaicism of the translation. There's an instructive metaphor that one can bite back, either like a lamb or like a dog, which is useful for interface design. I didn't know that gossip once meant something like god-sib, a close female friend. The paramount fear of cuckoldry made over half the stories tiresome. If one removed the majority of these, the remaining tales could repay close attention.

2011-01-24T16:05:00.000-08:00

As A Driven Leaf
(Milton Steinberg, 2 hours before I bailed)
I read this almost exactly 5 years ago, but this time I gave it a second chance because Josh Kornbluth and Rabbi Creditor included it in their current course. Only thing added in the second listen: This book appears to be the DC comic book to many rabbis, and their weakness for it traces to having devoted too much time to familiarizing themselves with the historical background of the talmud.

2011-01-21T16:25:00.000-08:00

True Grit
(Charles Portis, 6 hours, punted after 3)
I just never cared. It seemed so clear that I was reading a book written by a man, in the late 1960s, who was ventriloquizing a girl from a century before. I haven't seen the Coen brothers film, but thought the book would be foreplay. Instead, I just decided to not see the movie.

2011-01-18T16:10:00.000-08:00

500 Handmade Books: Inspiring Interpretations of a Timeless Form
Unfortunately, these mostly foreground the covers and bindings of books. I am intrigued to learn more about coptic stitching, but few of the included examples gave much feeling for the love of books as objects to fondle.

2011-01-10T16:00:00.000-08:00

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
(Siddhartha Mukherjee, 20:49)
Not that enthralling to me, although many people celebrated it as one of the best books of the year. Learned about the Jimmy fund's original mascot- he had an unpronounceable Scandinavian name, which transformed into a cute ad pitchable "nickname." The verbal trick of "radical" mastectomy has a profoundly unfortunate history. Nerve gas, from WWI, turned out to be the first effective chemo for leukemia.

2010-12-30T14:48:00.000-08:00

Life
(Keith Richards, 22:30, read by Johnny Depp)
Amazing window into the life of one of my favorite musicians. The last 4 hours even include huge lengths read directly by Keith Richards himself. Before listening to this, I'd assumed that Mick Jagger was the real brains in the stones. It is still true that he writes most of the Glimmer Twins' lyrics. But all the catchy riffs, powerful melodies, and the witches brew of blues and country traces to Keith Richards' gnarled hands. The opening part of the book, about his childhood, was the least interesting, and I skimmed after a while til 1963, the early months of which gave birth to the Rolling Stones. Keith Richards is a fascinating person, who disarmingly describes so much as his life as simply seeking the sound that feels right. His words compel you to recognize the authenticity of his drive. He has a few quirks, such as a tendency to just stay with friends for extended stretches of time. The first time this defined his later course was when he was hanging with Brian Jones, watching that supreme cad abuse his then girlfriend Anita Pallenberg. Richards describes how, without really trying, he won her over, and they fled to Morrocco. He has also spent extended stays with Ronnie Wood, Gram Parsons, and of course, the whole gang he hosted when they were tax exiles in the South of France recording Exile on Main street. His account of using heroin is non-glamorous, and although he went cold turkey multiple times, he kept hooking back in, until he finally went clean in 1979, while he was fighting a court case which threatened serious prison time in Canada. His commitment to his friends shines through, and when he describes the acrimony that has emerged between himself and Jagger since he quit heroin, it's quite persuasive that the enmity is due to Jagger's drive to hold all the control. Further proof of his charisma is that some of the most loyal people in his retinue came through his association with Jagger, and they jumped to stay with Richards. Every description of the music shines with such love that it should never be accepted second hand. The master speaks, and so often, gives so much of the credit to the fuzz of the low-tech sound recording equipment. I think he does this because what else can you say about visitations from the muse. For extra credit, if you don't know what a malaguena is, click that link. He chose to play a malaguena when first meeting the family of his wife (now of 27 years), and also to his mum on her deathbed.

2010-12-29T15:00:00.000-08:00

Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences
(Kristin Luker, 75 out of 320pp)
Bought this because Tyler Cowen praised it so highly as "one of the best books on the philosophy of the social sciences." To me, it read much more like a support manual, reminding grad students and fledgling researchers to do some exercise, and approach their practice as a praxis. I have long since realized that Tyler Cowen reads at least 5X faster than I can, so his recommendations are invariably moot. I don't disdain this book, but I'm not its target demographic.

2010-12-29T14:56:00.000-08:00

Here Comes Everybody
(Clay Shirky, 248 out of 344pp)
Read last fall, but I was already way behind the curve reading this 2008 book at a time when it's been so thoroughly digested into the zeitgeist that it is almost impossible to distinguish betwwen Shirky's clever extended metaphors and the shared hallucination that comes from drinking water in Silivalley. I stopped reading simply because it didn't hold any surprises, although I have to agree with the blurb from hotdogsladies.com that his book "is really good." What I actually want to read right now, but haven't got my hands on, is Jaron Lanier's You are not a gadget.

2010-12-29T14:50:00.000-08:00

Signifying Rappers
(Mark Costello & David Foster Wallace, 29 out of 140pp)
Poked at this around the time that DFW suicided (Sept 2008). It's a period piece (first published in 1990) mainly of interest for spelunking DFW, rather than for any profound insights into "rap and race in the urban present." Mark Costello was his college roommate, and they lived together again in Boston before Infinite Jest erupted.

2010-12-29T14:43:00.000-08:00

Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb
(William Poundstone, stopped at p258 of 294)
Great book, full of details on the interesting backstory of game theory and the MAD world von Neumann. I read this in May of 2008, at a wedding in Southern California, but now have to admit that I won't likely make time for the final 30pp. Highly recommended, although not before one first takes time to read Poundstone's Priceless.

2010-12-22T15:00:00.000-08:00

A heart breaking work of staggering genius
(Dave Eggers, 13:30)
I read this when it came out in hardback, around Feb 2000. Ten years later, it's finally available for dyslexics and audiophilic readers. Once, at a Roddy Doyle reading/interview with DE, I asked in the Q&A if Doyle cared about the audio versions of his books, since Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is my all time favorite. Both Doyle and Egger made faces that could not have been less disgusted if I'd hit them straight on with a colostomy bag. But I'm here to say that the audio book of AHWOSG is pretty damn good. I was going to fault it for lacking the prefatory remarks which were so winning/disarming/reflexive, but for some reason, the editors just moved them to the end, which makes phenomenological sense, since skipping over a chapter is so damn hard in audible books. When I read this in 2000, Berkeley was terra incognita, so I didn't really have an image of the house that they lived in at first on Spruce straight up Marin. The amazing interview he pitched to MTV (around p188 in the hardback) does drop out the phone numbers of his friends Marny, K.C. and Kirsten, but that occurred with the release of the paperback, when it was revealed that 6 of the millions of readers had called the numbers. (I was one of those nosy bastards; I just re-tried the 3 phone numbers, and all three are now out of service.) "I can tell you the names of my friends, their phone numbers [elided] but what do you have? You have nothing. They all granted permission. Why is that? Because you have nothing, you have some phone numbers. It seems precious for one, two seconds. You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this." As this shows, the tone is pitch perfect, and for a brief sparkle of time, the reader gets to actually feel cool. In the 10 years since it was published, we've all become self-exhibiting narcissists, without the talent or the personal tragedy to justify the self-enamorment. I have also been influenced by the snarkier than thou N+1 critique that hits on the regressive quality of the "eggersard" movement. In my private confession, I cop to sharing Eggers' feeling that hanging out with a young kid makes you feel more important and beautiful than anything else can possibly be. Combined with the entitlement that comes from surviving a tragedy, it was impossible not to feel that my life was better than any movie yet made.

2010-12-11T12:58:00.000-08:00

Stinky Smelly Feet: A Love Story
(Margie Palatini (Author) & Ethan Long (Illustrator), 48pp)
My kids love this stinky smelly love story. A keeper

2010-12-11T12:55:00.000-08:00

Yummy
(Lucy Cousins, 120pp)
The illustrator/painter/author of the million Maisy books breaks into the well-tilled field of folk tales, to reprise 8 stories such as Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood. I'm a fan of the brutality and horror. The main thing that annoyed me was her painting in big black letters a quote from the story, which is a kind of ilustration, but it's very easy to accidentally read it out of sequence. Not great, not even Maisy, but I'm happy for Ms. Cousins, who frequently kvetched in the back boards of her Maisy books about how hard it was to inspire herself to do her work.

2010-12-09T21:42:00.000-08:00

The Mind's Eye
(Oliver Sacks, 8:40)
The genial neurotic neurologist reviews cases covering alexia (inability to read) and agraphia (inability to write), as well as loss or recovery of stereo vision. The most intriguing chapter is narrated by Sacks himself, as he recounts his own cancer, an ocular melanoma. Given his earlier description of his membership in the NY stereopsis society, he can joke about the risk he runs of becoming its only monocular member. He reveals that he uses cannabis, amphetamine, and occasionally psychotherapy. Not his most interesting book, but this may be due in part to having succumbed to fighting cancer after his last book, the fine Musicophilia.

2010-12-08T23:57:00.000-08:00

Anthology of Rap
(Adam Bradley & Andrew DuBois (Editors), 920pp)
Nice follow up to The Anthologist, didn't immediately connect this volume to the reinterpretation of how to conceive of poetry living in the present age.

I didn't get much more into new lyrics than I have previously succeeded in enjoying more than a few rap artists.

2010-12-05T22:45:00.000-08:00

Philosophy: The Classics
(Nigel Warburton, 4:53)
Succinct, interesting quick tours of major philosophers. The only favorites of mine that are missing would be Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, and I suppose the latter is too contemporary to count as "classic." Nothing truly original here, but pithy and quick summations. I esp'ly enjoyed the discussion of Kierkegaard.

2010-12-01T21:07:00.000-08:00

Dynamic Judaism
(Menachem Creditor, 4:40)
Not a book, but a set of recorded lectures on how to wrestle with significant issues facing modern Judaism: What's the role of denominations? What can interpretation do to redress harsh passages in the Torah? Why not eat oysters? Quite stimulating, and chock full of interesting ideas. Not connected to Mordecai Kaplan's book on reconstructionism with the same title (not that I've read the latter, but Rabbi Creditor mentioned that he picked the title for its muscular associations, and only realized there was a same-titled book by Kaplan while preparing his notes.)

2010-11-30T00:49:00.000-08:00

The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness
(Jeff Warren, 11:38)
Cool, interesting, non-flaky exploration of experiences. The opening chapters on sleep are particularly fascinating, esp'ly the chapter on "The Watch." The watch is a natural phenomenon, all but lost after the transition to electric light, which occurs in the long nights of sleep, when people habitually experienced two segments of sleeping, separated by a prolactin saturated state of wakefulness. Apparently, most traditional societies knew this state quite well, and this would even include people at the time of Shakespeare. Very fun to read. His chapter on lucid dreaming made me re-assess engaging in this sport, although I am still not terrifically keen to develop the skill.

2010-11-29T23:42:00.000-08:00

Brer Rabbit and Uncle Remus
(Joel Chandler, 46 mins)
Librivox recording-- not the best collection, and the ones that rhyme are mostly doggerel. Inspite of the pall of racism that hangs over Uncle Remus, I have to defer to Twain's esteem for Chandler's capacity to capture dialect in spelling. When I was a little boy, this non-standard orthography fascinated and mystified me. Now, it's interesting as a fallible document of dialect.

2010-11-27T00:04:00.000-08:00

The anthologist
(Nicholson Baker, 256pp)
Superb, enthralling, and delightful. The first Nicholson Baker novel I've devoured since he got all kinky with Vox, and although he regained some equilibrium with the Fermata, I've not read him with an open ear in years. And this is a jewel, so touching, so full of insight, and tenderness.

2010-11-26T23:54:00.000-08:00

Airships
(Barry Hannah, punted after 85pp)
This set of short stories has been praised by many writers I enjoy. The kindle preview was funny enough for me to take the plunge. But in trying to read these stories, I found my interest flagging, maybe after the fourth or fifth time that a naked woman was referred to as showing "her organ." Each story seemed less charming than the prior (there's some sort of narrative embroidering that might tie them all together somehow but I just punted when it stopped feeling fun). The only thing I'm confident enough in my taste to object to: The chapter headings are in a really ugly bastardized variant of Cooper Black.

2010-11-25T11:48:00.000-08:00

The Deal: A Hollywood Novel
(Peter Lefcourt, 8:57, skimmed)
Funny 1991 novel of a bum who's on the cusp of suicide when his nephew arrives with a screenplay about Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone. Even though it's funny, the bizarre world it parodies is not attractive or particularly interesting to me.

2010-11-22T13:34:00.000-08:00

Art of the slow cooker : 80 exciting new recipes
(Andrew Schloss, 215 pp)
Exciting isn't the half of it! I've already made the deliciously meaty root vegetable soup, and I'm spring-loaded to try the Pumpkin and Chevre lasagna. I read through this entire cookbook, and plan to make at least 5 or 6 of the recipes. Many are meat-based, but vegetarians also get in on the slow cooking scene.

2010-11-19T22:10:00.000-08:00

Upside of Irrationality: the unexpected benefits of defying logic at work and at home
(Dan Ariely, 334pp)
Even if this is not quite as good as his first book, I hope Dan Ariely squirts one of these books out every other year. This one has the same breezy informality, although it dwells at greater length on the experiences surrounding his having burned 70% of his body at the age of 18. The description he gives of finally seeing himself in the mirror, and the continuing self-consciousness he reports feeling even today about his looks, cut through the suave presentation, and remind readers that he suffered gravely, and continues to experience the aftermath of trauma.

2010-11-18T23:57:00.000-08:00

The games we played : the golden age of board & table games
(Margaret Hofer, 159pp)
Interesting, but not very penetrating. Most of the packaging promised exciting activity, whereas, in actuality, nearly every game was a version of chutes and ladders, with a teetotum (not quite a top or dreidel) instead of dice. One of the more bizarre genres was structured conversation cards, where people could read both a question, and provide an answer, all from cues.

2010-11-17T22:23:00.000-08:00

The Healing Powers of Chocolate
(Cal Orey, 302pp)
Kind of yucky author personality, mediocre prose, undistinguished, but it's still about chocolate. This woman's already cranked out books on the "healing powers of vinegar" and "h.p. of olive oil." The only aspect of the recipes that stuck: Mix cacao into lasagna. I'll try that. Even when she's claiming that chocolate has almost no caffeine, her next paragraph caveats that with the observation that the abundant theobromines have a "stimulating effect on the CNS." If this book were better than reading wikipedia (one of her footnoted sources), it should speak to how to compare theobromines to caffeine. The article on theobromine in wikipedia says 10X more than her whole book. Although the book's publication date is 2010, she refers to Scharffen Berger as an independent (it was bought by Hershey in 2005, and they closed the Berkeley manufacturing plant in 2009).

2010-11-11T21:52:00.000-08:00

Recycling Projects for the Evil Genius
(Russel J. Gehrke, 236pp)
Tons of green ideas fo cleaners/pesticides. Not so much more than that. It doesn't obviate the huge role for East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse, nor does this book even guide the reader to ways to use all the junk available through the Depot.

2010-11-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

For Better: The Science of Good Marriage
(Tara Parker Pope, 9:47)
At times, this book descends into cliché sociology, reporting factoids of surprising correlations that beg for some skepticism about the possibility that there's a better explanation than the surface correspondence. As one example, the importance of how a couple tells the "how we met" story is said to be a powerful predictor of whether they'll stay together. While it's plausible that counting "we" vs. "me" statements may catch something, a lot of the longevity of a marriage depends on more than how the meeting story is told. The number, that for every negative statement, a couple needs to generate 5 positive statements to counterbalance it, will stick with me, even if it's a bit coarse. My curiosity about gathering any tips sustained my interest, even if the author was not super acute in her own distillation of this mass of research.

2010-11-01T21:36:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan in America
(Sean Wilentz, 400pp - returned before reading the Village era)
Well written, engaging, and this Princeton historian deserves to grab the mantle, since he grew up in the Village at the very time that Bob Dylan's meteoric appearance crashed through the folkie scene. I concentrated on the later albums first, since Wilentz proves his acumen by casting a cold, probing evaluation of some of the more dubious works. The late Dylan album that I revere, World Gone Wrong, receives high marks from Wilentz.

2010-10-28T21:17:00.000-07:00

Art of Choosing
(Sheena Iyengar, 331pp)
Excellent tour of the research covered over the past 15 years by this generation's most interesting experimental psychologist. It's a tribute to Iyengar's penetrating curiosity that all of her work can be regaled as instances of choosing. The opening chapter is quite self-revelatory, and then, it felt as if each chapter was even better than the last. I was fascinated to learn (p106) that she "leadthe design and implementation of a new permanent feature of the MBA at Columbia, in which all entering students would receive 360-degree feedback... Over 90% of the students found significant discrepancies between how they saw themselves and how others interpreted their actions." Iyengar has crossed through many worlds, starting with the suddenly re-unified Germany during college, Kyoto during grad school, then on through worlds of food, finance and fashion.

2010-10-25T21:41:00.000-07:00

Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
(Jesse Schell, 489pp)
Schell's talk on the Gamepocalypse, reprised for the Seminar of the Long Now foundation, was so eye-opening that I had to read his work. This book uses "lens" as a technical path to just throw in one damn thing after another, so long as it would help illuminate some aspect of playing or designing games. If you didn't already know this stuff, it would be a fine source for learning about it. But very little is original, so my attention was mostly snagged on what part of this fat book traces to the author's own ideas. The concept of "interest curve" (pp247ff) is worth knowing about, but even there, most of the observations are commonplace.

2010-10-12T14:06:00.000-07:00

Take the Kids Paris & Disneyland Resort Paris
(Helen Truszkowski, 256pp)
I brought this, and found some very helpful tips (e.g., Paris' best tea house is at the Mosque, below the Jardins des Plantes). This could have been half the size, if I'd ripped and tossed the 2nd part, which is focused on Euro-Disney. Still, it fits in a backpack, and helped me find lots of enjoyable places to visit with my sons.

2010-10-10T14:16:00.000-07:00

Lonely Planet Italy

This was the one guide I brought. I didn't bother to use it for Venice, but I wasn't really trying to do anything in Venice except survive and wander around with my young sons. Since my base was Pordenone (for the Cinema Muto Festival), this guide tipped me to visit Udine (a nice little town with a very interesting center). I also relied on this guide when we went to Padua & Trieste. Though we were only barreling through Milan, the book gave me teaser descriptions of where I would have hurtled myself had I ended up with a spare hour.

2010-10-03T13:49:00.000-07:00

City of Falling Angels
(John Behrendt, punted after 2 hours)
I thought I'd re-read this, since I was visiting Venice for the 2nd time in my life, after my first trip (and reading of the book) 5 years ago. But I wasn't as intrigued. Another huge difference today: I traveled with twins, just under 4, and they demanded so much attention that used to be available to listen while wandering.