Please don’t talk to me, middle seat person. I’m reading.

Feb28 by Kinsey

I spent the last two weeks traveling on business, which meant that I was too exhausted at the end of the day to put two words together for a post, but I got LOTS of reading done in airports, on airplanes, and in hotel rooms and lobbies. While I will spare you descriptions of the many in-flight magazines and celebrity tabloids I read during the enforced no-electronics portions of my flights, here are quick summaries of the books that kept me sane as I criss-crossed the country:

The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides
This was fine, I guess? I was interested in all the characters and I wanted to find out what happened, so it was compelling reading. On the other hand, it was really long and nothing much actually happened and there was almost no resolution of any sort and just because I was interested in the characters didn’t mean I liked them. In fact, pretty much everyone in the book was extremely unpleasant or shallow, so it was a bit like watching a very long, slow train wreck as these characters messed up their lives over and over. I had initially written here that I wanted to warn people about an unflattering portrayal of a character with a mental illness, but all of the characters were portrayed in unflattering ways so the manic depressive actually came out pretty well, comparatively speaking. I loved The Virgin Suicides, so Eugenides has credit in the bank with me, but while The Virgin Suicides felt airy and impressionistic, this dense, heavy, weighty novel feels like it was written by someone else entirely. English majors might like it though, since it seems to feature a lot of inside jokes about literary criticism.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Remember how back in the 1970s a French guy strung a tightrope between the two World Trade Center towers and walked back and forth between the buildings, a hundred floors up with no safety net? This novel describes what was happening in the lives of a number of New York residents on that day, and how they were all connected to the wire walker and to each other. Although it does feature the walker (in real life, his name was Philippe Petit and you can watch an amazing documentary about his walk called Man on Wire), the story isn’t really about him at all. It’s really about New York, and America, in the 1970s–Vietnam, crime in the cities, race, immigration, and how all these things play out in the life a few individuals. As a general rule, I don’t like books that follow multiple characters connected only by the thinnest of threads. However, in this book each character is beautiful and heart-breaking and I found that they all looped together in really satisfying ways. Sad, but lovely.

The Thrift Book by India Knight
I think I’ve explained here before that I want India Knight to be my best friend, so I adored this book, even though it is basically just a list of fairly obvious ways to save money. You know, cook at home, make Christmas presents, grow your own herbs, don’t be fooled by fancy skin creams. Knight puts a fun spin on it by focusing not on getting out of debt or being as cheap as possible, but by talking about all the ways her strategies make you feel (to sound English about it) posher and more glamorous by not trying to hard or getting caught up spending on foolish thing. Plus, she’s funny. At one point she refers to playing Scrabble online as her “ongoing Alzheimer’s prevention project,” which is exactly how I think of Words with Friends. However, if you are not trying to befriend or become India Knight, it’s probably not necessary to read this.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Really fun, and absolutely perfect airplane reading. A sci-fi story that manages to be both a puzzle/treasure hunt and a celebration of 80s pop culture. I think is truly aimed at folks a few years older than I am who spent much more time in video arcades, but I loved it and was so absorbed I was able to read it in even the loudest terminals and restaurants.

Hiring the Best by Martin Yate

Feb27 by Rebecca

Hiring the Best: A Manager’s Guide to Effective Interviewing and Recruiting, Fifth Edition
By Martin Yate
2006

This is yet another assigned book. One day I will again read for pleasure, but that day will likely not be until the summer. Sigh.

In the mean time, though, I was surprised and pleased to discover that I actually enjoyed this book. Job interviews are not a topic that I consider particularly interesting, beyond the sheer necessity, but the book wound up being enthralling. It goes through all sorts of questions, discussing what those questions are actually asking, how to pick which questions to ask, and how to interpret the answers that you get back. It was also a really slow read, because I was constantly scripting out how I would answer certain interview questions.

As the subtitle states, the book is about recruiting and interviewing. Yate does an amazing job of introducing and concluding with a thorough discussion of how to think about recruiting. Then about half the book in the middle lists and discusses potential questions to ask in a job interview, going over hundreds of possible questions.

It covers what traits an employer should be looking for in potential employees for different positions and then how to tailor a job interview to get at those traits. As someone who is more likely (I hope) to be in a job interview next as an interviewee rather than an interviewer, I found it helpful to consider what these questions are actually asking and how the answers will be judged. However, given my one and only experience running job interviews from the other side of the table, I am extremely grateful that I will never again be quite as incompetent at it as I was then.

Yate writes with a blunt conversational style that I enjoy, and while I don’t agree with his perspective on a couple of things (he’s very corporate sector while I’m more nonprofit sector,) it’s not a pervasive issue. It’s more of a sense that I like him but I wouldn’t talk politics with him for fear of changing that.

Despite the fact that I’m not all that interested in management, I do acknowledge that it’s useful to know about and Yate seems to know what he’s talking about and describes it well. I strongly suggest this book to anyone who’s on the job market or in management.

The Fabulous Clipjoint

Feb25 by Anna

By Fredric Brown

Let’s talk a little bit about Pulp Mysteries. I LOVE them, even though they are deeply offensive by most of today’s standards, and the mindset of a hardboiled detective is about as far from my own as it is possible to be.

I was first introduced to them in high school, when my family went through a phase of watching movies from the 40s, including The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and The Thin Man. I went from there to reading Dashiell Hammett, who I absolutely love, and a little Raymond Chandler, who threw around the n-word enough to make me too uncomfortable to read most of his books.*

For a while, I looked for contemporary authors who also used the hardboiled style, and found Robert B. Parker (entertaining fluff that my mom accurately criticized for never allowing his characters to grow), Bill Pronzini (who has a nice gimmick of having a narrating detective who is never given a name), and my then favorite Joseph Hansen (featuring a gay insurance investigator who is as tough and stoic as any Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe).

Several years ago I picked up a collection of short stories titled Detective Duos, and was introduced to Fredric Brown’s Ed and Am Hunter, who immediately supplanted all other pulp mysteries in my heart forever. He wrote seven novels and one short story about the detective pair, all of which were published between 1947 and 1963 and are currently out of print, as far as I know. Tracking down each precious copy might have added just a little bit to my love of the series. (Much thanks to my wonderful sister for finding the seventh and rarest novel for me as a Christmas present a few years ago!)

In my opinion, Fredric Brown has not gotten the recognition he deserves as an author in any genre, though he is more known in the science fiction genre. I haven’t actually read any of those, but my impression is that they fit in fairly well with other contemporary science fiction novels, while his pulp mysteries really stand out from the rest.

The first book of the series, The Fabulous Clipjoint, introduces us to Ed Hunter, who is just 18 and teams up with his uncle, Ambrose “Am” Hunter, to solve the murder of his father. They live in gritty noir-ish Chicago, and feel the bitterness and cynicism of every other pulp detective, but Brown writes them with honesty and vulnerability that makes them more relatable and likeable than any other pulp mystery characters I’d read. I knew this book was something special when Ed makes a speech about wanting to have a drink of whiskey in honor of his dad, downs a hefty shot of whiskey, and promptly throws up.

Funny story, though: My first copy of The Fabulous Clipjoint ended with a plot dead-end with the detectives stumped, and I was a little taken aback but impressed at Brown’s moxie at showing that real-life mysteries don’t always end in tidy packages. Then, I ran across another copy in a used book store, and realized that my first copy was missing the last third of the book. The actual ending isn’t as bravely unusual, but is a lot more satisfying as a reader.

*Rereading The Fabulous Clipjoint, there are more casual racial slurs than I’d remembered, which is very unfortunate. They never actually describe a specific character, which is something of a poor salve for my conscience, but one I have to hang on to or else quit pulp mysteries forever.

—Anna

Dark Road to Darjeeling

Feb21 by Anna

By Deanna Raybourne

I wasn’t really intending to review this book because it is the fourth in a series that I’d already talked about, but I haven’t posted in a while and I had a serious issue with the conclusion, which I’m going to spoil the hell out of below the break.

But first, some non-spoilers. One thing I really appreciated is that the Dark Road to Darjeeling takes place at least several months after the third book, which is kind of refreshing. So often each mystery novel in a series happens within a week of the last one that it becomes kind of ridiculous how often the main characters run across murders.

Again, like the first few books, the relationship between the hero and heroine kind of wavered for me. Pretty much scene-by-scene I would go between appreciation and irritation. The relationship is very progressive for the Victorian setting (perhaps anachronistically so), but also very repressive by today’s standards, so when I recalled the Victorian setting, I would be impressed with the relationship, but when I compared it to my own relationship, I would get my feminist self all riled up.

Anyway, this book is set in a remote area of India, and I found the descriptions of the setting and various peripheral characters the most interesting of any of the books in the series so far. And, after the mystery was solved, there was an additional twist that didn’t bother me nearly so much as the mystery solution and which bodes for some interesting characterization in the fifth book.

Alright, so now that the pleasantries are taken care of, I’m going to spoil the entire murder mystery of the book after the break. I actually feel a little hesitant to do this, like I’m breaking a reader’s cardinal rule, but here goes:

Continue reading →

The Non-Designer’s Presentation Book by Williams

Feb19 by Rebecca

The Non-Designer’s Presentation Book
By Robin Williams*
2010

Yay! This is a good book. The streak of unpleasant books has ended! This book is current, it has good advice, and, I admit, it’s also pretty (lot’s of sharp pictures illustrating the various principles.)

Like the other books I’ve read recently, this covered a lot of basic foundational concepts, but this time I felt they were covered in a way that respected me as the reader.

I’m now a bit daunted by the thought of actually trying to give a good presentation and a bit retroactively embarrassed by some of my previous presentations. I think the main argument to this book is that it’s important to learn how to actually use a presentation program (like PowerPoint or Keynote or a couple of the other program) and to not ever depend on their templates. You can create really excellent and elegant presentations with these programs if you know what you’re doing and what to pay attention to.

It’s a challenge; I’m going to have to spend some serious time with a PowerPoint tutorial before putting together my next set of presentation slides. But I think my next presentation will be a lot better than my various previous ones.

I imagine this book will go out of date relatively quickly, by say 2015 or 2020 at the latest, as the norms of presentations change again and the technologies described here get replaced by something newer and fancier. But for now, it’s current and lovely. I definitely recommend it.

* This is a woman, and not an actor.

Writing that Works by Roman and Raphaelson

Feb18 by Rebecca

Writing That Works
By Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson
2000

I don’t generally read books that I don’t like. Why bother?

As it turns out, the answer to that is, if they are assigned, then it matters to my grade and thus I had better go ahead and read them.

But really, this makes four for four for this one class, and I just want to read something that I unambiguously enjoy.* At least this book was relatively short and easy to speed read.

Writing That Works is a how-to book that is both extremely basic (know the meanings of the words you use and don’t confuse “its” and “it’s”) and highly dated (a lot of people are now using this crazy thing called “e-mail” to communicate with.)

The simplified nature of the rules it gives for writing means that they remain true. As important as it was to learn them in elementary school, it’s probably equally important to review them periodically. I just get irritated by being told rules that I already know AND that I would argue are often best demonstrated by their exceptions.

It is important to know the rules so that when you break them, you do so intentionally.

Oddly, Writing That Works acknowledges that some rules are meant to be broken but only in the chapter on political correctness, quoting Bernard Shaw’s definition of a gentleman as someone who “never insults a person unintentionally.” While admitting that you may occasionally want to insult someone, it fails to acknowledge that sometimes you don’t want to use the most common words in short sentences.

Sometimes it is useful to use rarer words and complex phrases. I quote Mark Twain: “The difference between the almost right work & the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

So overall, I would say that if you want to improve your writing, this is a somewhat useful book. But read it with the goal of thinking about what it says as if the statements were suggestions for you to consider rather than rules for you to follow.

* Although being able to grammatically write “four for four for” might well make it all worth it.** It’s not quite up there with “I, where you had had ‘had,’ had had ‘had had;’ ‘had had’ had had a better effect.” but it’s still fun.***

** Actually another thing that makes it worth reading is it introduced me to the story of David Ogilvy and his Russian matryoshka dolls. Ogilvy would give these dolls to his board members with notes saying: “If you hire people who are smaller than you are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If you hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants.”

*** The fact that enjoy these examples of phrases which are grammatical but excruciatingly difficult to parse may have something to do with the fact that I didn’t enjoy a book about writing in a simple and straight-forward fashion.

Bargaining for Advantage by G. Richard Shell

Feb15 by Rebecca

Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People, 2^nd Edition
By G. Richard Shell
2006

I’m going to start off by saying that I recommend this book: it’s well written and it’s useful.

That is not to say that I enjoyed it. But for now, I’m going to focus on the “useful” aspect.

Bargaining for Advantage did an amazing job of teaching me a topic that I really wanted to avoid and doing so in as enjoyable a manner as possible, which just wasn’t all that enjoyable. It was kind of like having a really nice, capable guy for a dentist. He’s a nice guy, it’s a necessary experience, and wow do I not want to deal with it.

As I mentioned in a previous review, I did not find Difficult Conversations particularly useful because the conversations that book dealt with were not the ones that I find difficult. What do I find difficult? Bargaining.

So, my first reaction is to shudder in horror at the title. I hate bargaining, I consider myself quite bad at it, and I avoid it whenever possible. I don’t even like thinking about bargaining. To me, paying a higher price for something is an irritating but acceptable price to pay for not having to bargain.

Despite this, once more and for the same class, I read a book that I found painful to force my way through. However, I’m willing to acknowledge that it’s my own idiosyncrasies that made it so, and the book itself is actually quite good. It’s both well written and provides useful information and good advice on implementation.

The book has two main parts: the first half discusses the foundations of any negotiation and it just made me cringe because I didn’t want to have to deal with any of them. The second half is about the negotiation process and that, while still painful, was also somewhat soothing to my poor introverted and avoidance-heavy sensibilities. It walked me through how to deal with the six foundations previously introduced. I still don’t want to deal with them and I’m not looking forward to any actual bargaining experiences, but I do think I have a much better handle on how to approach those situations when they’re necessary.

Also, the negotiation styles and techniques were all illustrated with a plethora of examples from around the world and throughout history. The stories were all fun, fascinating, and informative. They consisted of little anecdotes about modern and historical figures, familiar and foreign cultures, and successes and failures at the bargaining table. They were pretty much the saving grace of this book for my sanity, since every time I started to worry too much about having to (oh dear god) deal with some bargaining technique myself, there would be some bit of historical or cultural trivia coming my way.

So to sum up, I hated reading it, but it was still an excellent book and I learned a lot.

Cool, Calm & Contentious

Feb11 by Anna

By Merrill Markoe

I did not know who Merrill Markoe was when I first saw her touting this book on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but she was so funny on the show and the excerpts from the book were so funny that I immediately put my name on the waiting list at the library. Apparently along with everyone else in Boulder, too, because it took several months for the book to come to me.

Then, I mentioned the book to my office-mate, and she caught me up that Markoe was a comedy writer for David Letterman and dated him for several years, which was good information to have for several of the essays which discuss her love life in satirically veiled terms.

I expected the book to be really funny; what I didn’t expect was for it to be so insightful. At least three different points she makes were directly applicable to my life, and at least one has already made an improvement in my life. How many books can you say that about? Especially ones that are already sidesplitting.

I have to warn that one of the essays, about two-thirds of the way through the book, starts funny like all the others, but then veers into pretty dark territory. After that, it is all comedy again, but it threw me for a bit of a loop.

—Anna

Words on the Internets

Feb8 by Kinsey

I’m in an odd reading place right now, halfway through a bunch of different books and not feeling like any of them are things I want to review. So I thought instead I’d talk about the other main kind of reading I do: online stuff. Yes, I read Twitter and tiny bits of grammatically-incorrect blog content like everyone else, but there is also great, long-form writing to be found on the Internet. Some is just the online presence of traditional print magazines (like the Texas Monthly article I’m about to recommend) but lots of it is unique to the web and you shouldn’t miss it just because it is not on paper. Here are three of the best long-form pieces I’ve read online lately:

1) The Body on Somerton Beach by Mike Dash

The Smithsonian blog posted this fabulous article about the decades-old mystery of a body found on an Australian beach. I watch enough 48 Hours Mystery and Dateline episodes to know that most murders are just not that complicated. The murderer is generally a spouse or someone that the victim owed money to, and the stories generally don’t get more exciting than that. I came away from this article convinced that the (still unknown!) truth behind this mystery man is way more exciting than anything I will ever come up with.

2) Winona Ryder’s Forever Sweater by Sarah Miller

It’s an article about . . . a sweater? And friendship? And becoming an adult? I don’t know how to describe it, but I found it sweet and funny and insightful.

3) The Lost Boys by Skip Hollandsworth

Okay, the last two articles were comparatively light and non-traumatizing, so let me warn you that this one is not. This is sad and features a lot of dead and missing children. (That sentence was for my friend Liz. She and I recently went to see The Woman in Black and agree that it needed some sort of warning that the central plot point involved MULTIPLE dead children.) This Texas Monthly article about a serial killer who operated in Houston back before any one talked about serial killers, is amazing and heartbreaking. It specifically focuses on how, prior to the Internet and social media and easy communication between law enforcement agencies, it was almost impossible for the Houston police or the community to connect a series of disappearances of young boys. Instead, the police dismissed the individual cases as runaways and grieving families were left with no answers for decades.

Finally, I know I just said that I hate watching videos on the computer and I do, but this one about the what books in bookstores do at night when no one is around is worth making an exception for.

“Difficult Conversations” by Stone, Patton and Heen

Feb4 by Rebecca

Difficult Conversations, 10^th Anniversary Edition
By Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen
1999, 2010

There is a reason why I don’t tend to read self-help type books (or attend church services very often either), and that problem is separating the wheat from the chaff. I believe that no one is perfect but everyone has something of value; it’s the ratio of valuable insight to crap that can get annoying.

I rediscovered this as I was reading my next assigned text, Difficult Conversations.

There was a lot of chaff in the book and not much wheat.

I was not looking forward to reading this book anyway, because I hate difficult conversations and will attempt to avoid them if I reasonably can. I have had several situations over the years that maybe could have been improved by my being willing to confront a situation head on and a couple more situations where I was impressed with another person for their strength of will that allowed them to start a needed conversation. So, I started this book, not looking forward to the reading, but expecting it to be good for me.

Instead I discover that once more I am enough of an odd duck that when the authors talk about how I think X, Y, or Z, — and the author’s do write in the second person, “you do this”, “you do that” in order to make all of their pronouncements as personal as possible — I’m over here going, wait, but I almost always respond with G or H or J, rarely with X, and think Y and Z are idiotic. So why are the authors telling me that I always make a certain set of assumptions (which I don’t) and should instead soliciting the other person’s interpretations, when they (the authors) are making all sorts of assumptions about me and, by virtue of the medium being a book, not giving me the opportunity much less an invitation to clarify my side?

At which point I’m feeling all maligned like one of their example cases AND feeling like I’m unnatural in some way, AND feeling like an idiot for taking this personally.

When I brought up my problem with the book in class, though, expecting other students to have had similar thoughts, I discovered that apparently I really am that odd and no one else had a similar take. A lot of the other students thought it was an excellent book that helped a lot. A few of the other students didn’t care for the book for one reason or another (it was simplistic, it contained too many scenarios and not enough theory, the scenarios were all a bit too contrived, etc.), but none of them disliked it for the same reason that I did.

There were some good points. The book did offer some useful ideas about how to distinguish the real goal of several different types of difficult conversations, how to think about each type of confrontation, and how to prepare for each type. Plus, the actual writing is quite well done, and the book goes pretty fast (or it would if I didn’t have to put it down and walk away periodically.)

However, my big conclusion is that while everybody has some set of conversations that they find really unpleasant to participate in, we don’t all agree on what set of conversations those are — a conversation that I consider difficult may not be one that you do and vice versa. And this book really was not addressing my issues at all.