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books

Housekeeping vs. The Dirt

Ahh, a book about books. There are a lot of them out there and I’ve read a few. I never watch TV shows about TV…or movies about film…but I do read books about reading books. If you spend a few hours with Nick Hornby and this short read, you will leave with a new-found respect for reading.

Early on he says:

And boredom, let’s face it, is a problem that many of us have come to associate with books. It’s one of the reasons why we choose to do almost anything else rather than read; very few of us pick up a book after the children are in bed and the dinner has been made and the dirty dishes are cleared away. We’d rather turn on the television. Some evenings we’d rather go to all the trouble of getting in a car and driving to the cinema, or waiting for a bus that might take us somewhere near one.

A few paragraphs later he says:

I would never attempt to dissuade someone from reading a book. But please, if you’re reading a book that’s killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren’t enjoying a TV program.

Reading is not an easy endeavor to pick up and as a form of entertainment, it’s a lot more work than the other options. I want people to read more. I want book stores to continue to thrive and authors to have the ability to make a good living. I love the endeavor and if I were to evangelize about anything, it would be reading. If I can convert one human in 2007 to start reading ten books a year, then I have achieved raging success. I have my targets.

That’s the effect that this book had on me. It also caused me ruminate about how important reading is to me and how thankful I am that I got started at a young age, before all the distractions of TV, internet, and gaming. I owe it all to my grandfather. I can’t peg the exact day that I first sat in this strange bamboo-like double chair-couch thing in the corner of the porch in his lake house in Michigan and shared some Louis L’Amour with him, but the memory is as vivid as yesterday. The earliest recollection of reading a book from cover to cover and discussing it with my grandfather happened there, and the book, I think, was Kilkenny.

This book also exposed gaps in my reading experience that I started to recognize here. Hornby makes a self-deprecating crack about how his reading habits are confined to the English-speaking world, as if no other languages are worthy of his attention. I take it a few steps further by nearly exclusively focusing my reading efforts on books by English-speaking white males. Yes, ’twill be rectified, but it’s going to take time.

In this book, Hornby reviews about 60 or 70 books in one or two paragraphs each. He’s an interesting guy and I love his take on things, although sometimes I get lost in the British humor. But he has spent a lot of time in the US and often makes keen insights into our culture. I think there’s one book of Hornby’s that I haven’t read yet and I’m going to knock that off this year. Here are some of his reads from this book that I plan on reading:

Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy D. Tyson
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky by Ken Dornstein
Citizen Vince by Jess Walter

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books

M is for Malice

One of the reasons I like Tony Hillerman and Sue Grafton so much is the continuity of the main characters. Almost all of their books have the same main characters and it’s fascinating to witness their development.

With Hillerman, I came along in the middle of the stories about Navajo tribal policemen Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn. I read them out of order, so even though Hillerman is the top dog as far as I’m concerned, it would have even been better if I’d started them in chronological order and went from there (something I will do before I die).

My experience with Grafton has been ideal. I started at the beginning, with A is for Alibi, and have grown with Kinsey Millhone, the main character, over the last 13 books. This book, M is for Malice, is probably the most in-depth study thus far of Kinsey’s emotional state. Grafton really digs into Kinsey’s familial relationships and dredges up some past loves, and the mystery at hand hits especially close to home for this single, thirty-five year old, female private investigator who loves fast food. I’m not going to dig into the plot but to say that it was another solid effort and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

I think that Grafton sometimes tries to hard to make Kinsey kind of quirky cool. Kinsey is cool enough without hearing more about how she doesn’t care about her hair or only has one dress-up outfit (unlike your average woman I guess). I’m not sure why I perceive this, but it could be because I read so few books by women. I just noticed it near end of this book; in the last 34 books, I’ve only read two female authors, Grafton and Casey. And there are none in the hopper, save for more of Grafton. It’s not intentional, but what does that make me? An idiot? A chauvinist? Or are there just more male writer’s than female so I don’t have any choice?

I think of my taste in books as flexible, wide-ranging, varied, open-minded, but am I fooling myself? I gotta dig into this issue…

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books

The Ambler Warning

The pool, the sun, the warmth…ahh, Florida vacations. That can only mean one thing, paperbacks and a lounge chair! How better to fill the paperback side of things than with Robert Ludlum? Well, there are better ways, but he filled the bill adequately.

Keep in mind that Robert Ludlum is dead. This book was published after his death. According to the info on the copyright page:

Since his death, the Estate of Robert Ludlum has worked with a carefully selected author and editor to prepare and edit this work for publication.

Makes sense I guess. It certainly felt and read like a Ludlum book. Huge conspiracy within a conspiracy and lots of action that spanned the globe. Great for reading next to the pool. I enjoyed it.

I’m warning you though, it’s somewhat formulaic. In fact, it felt a lot like The Bourne Identity because the main character was out of commission for a few years in a psych hospital and lost his identity. And much like Jason Bourne, he has a special woman, unfamiliar with spy-craft, who helps him get through this identity crisis emotionally and tactically.

Now, onto some Sue Grafton…the ultimate pool-side paperback queen…

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books

The Americanization of Ben Franklin

Before this book, I’ve always had a tainted view of Ben Franklin because of the existence of those Ben Franklin stores. I could never figure them out. Were they supposed to be like a Walgreens, a Wal-Mart, or a Dollar General? Or are they a combination of all three? Well, here is what the Ben Franklin website says about it. Nonetheless, if the store reflected the man, a Ben Franklin store would be more like a Marshall Fields…famous, unpretentious, and dead. No seriously, this was an excellent book and I’m happy that I have a deeper understanding of the man.

He was born in 1706 of humble means in Boston but became famous in Philadelphia. By the time he retired at age 42, he was one of the wealthiest men in America and on his way to becoming a world famous inventor, writer, philosopher, and politician. He died in 1790 and his death was mourned far more by France than the United States. This book walks the reader through Franklin’s life and relates his successes and failures to the tumultuous times of the New World and Early America. I’m going to organize my description in the same way the author organized the chapters. I’m doing so because I think a major strength of this book is the way Wood defines the sections of Franklin’s life in a coherent, easy-to-understand method.

Becoming a Gentleman (1706-1756)
In the early 1700s, you were either a gentleman or a commoner, there was no middle ground. That is, until Ben Franklin turned this situation upside down. Wood says about Franklin:

In effect, he began acquiring some of the attributes of a gentleman while still remaining one of the common working people. In 1727 he organized a group of artisans who met weekly for learned conversation – a printer, several clerks, a glazier, two surveyors, a shoemaker, a cabinetmaker, and subsequently “a young Gentleman of some Fortune,” named Robert Grace, who did not have to work for a living……It was this kind of aspiring and prosperous middling man that was beginning to challenge the hierarchical network of privilege and patronage that dominated eighteenth-century society, and in the process blurring the traditionally sharp social division between gentleman and commoners.

He was so successful in his printing business that he accumulated substantial wealth by his retirement in 1948. However, he did not become a full-fledged “gentleman” until about a decade later after spending many years “organizing clubs, starting libraries, promoting schools, leading the Masons, and becoming involved in dozens of activities that were well beyond the reach and consciousness of nearly all tradesman and artisans.”

Becoming a British Imperialist (1757-1764)
The start of this stage in his life found Franklin consumed with electricity. This interest manifested itself in a book about electricity that was published in America and Europe and solidified his fame worldwide. By the end of this stage he was on a mission to align the interests of America and Great Britain. He loved London and believed that America and Great Britain could coexist and even thrive. Wood quotes Franklin and says that Franklin desired that

…the people of Great Britain and the people of the colonies “learn to consider themselves, not as belonging to different Communities with different Interests, but to one Community with one Interest.”

Wood does not sugarcoat the life of Franklin. It was during this period that Franklin acquired slaves and grew more distant from his wife Deborah. In 1764 he left for an extended stay in London and never saw his wife again, and he didn’t seem to care much about that.

Becoming a Patriot (1765-1774)
Franklin spent about a decade in London trying to get Great Britain and the colonies to get along. By this time, Great Britain was well into the mode of taxation without representation. He brawled with Parliament about the Stamp Act, a tax basically on “nearly every form of paper used in the colonies.” In front of Parliament “he made it clear as possible that Parliament had no right to lay a stamp tax on the colonists, and his pointed responses probably saved his reputation in America.”

Try as he might, through nasty politics on both sides of the ocean, conciliation between Great Britain and the colonies was not meant to be. Franklin eventually started to feel disfavor towards Great Britain and when he sailed for America in early 1775, he was described as “a passionate patriot, more passionate in fact than nearly all the other [American] patriot leaders.”

Becoming a Diplomat (1775-1784)
When Franklin got back to America the fighting had already started. Franklin’s main role in the Revolutionary War was to “seek foreign support for the war.” He went to France, achieved several diplomatic successes, and fell in love with the country (a feeling felt mutually by the French towards Franklin). Wood says,

Not only did Franklin hold the Franco-American alliance together, but he also oversaw the initial stages of the successful peace negotiations with Britain. And he did this all with a multitude of demands placed on him.

This, by a man in his 70s, in a time when people did not live as long as they do now. Wood concludes this section by making a big proclamation,

If Washington was indispensable to the success of the Revolution in America, Franklin was indispensable to the success of the Revolution abroad.

Becoming an American (1785-1790)
As Franklin’s life winds down, Wood brings the book to a rousing conclusion. Immediately before his death, Franklin made an effort to abolish slavery. It was rejected by America but Wood attributes the eventual abolishment of it partly to Franklin.

Virginia and the South always claimed that they had remained closer to the eighteenth-century beginnings of the nation, and they were right. It was the North that had changed and changed dramatically. Because northern Americans came to celebrate work so emphatically – with Franklin as their most representative figure – the leisured slaveholding aristocracy of Virginia and the rest of the South became a bewildered and beleaguered minority out of touch with the enterprise and egalitarianism that had come to dominate the country. As long as work had been held in contempt, as it had for millennia, slavery could never have been wholeheartedly condemned. But to a society that came to honor work as fully as the North did, a leisured aristocracy and the institution of slavery that supported it had to become abominations.

Wow, that is quite a tribute to Franklin. I am going to have to toss it around a little before I buy off on it though.

Great book.

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books

By Order of the President

Boy oh boy, I’m fired up. I’ve never read any W.E.B. Griffin, but the guy can spin a yarn. It fires me up because it’s a new discovery for me in the genre of military fiction, which is something I’ve gotten away from the past few years. I read the first five or six Tom Clancy novels as soon as they came out, but I just tired of them. I think it was because I felt the characters were kind of hollow and there were too many military and intelligence technicalities.

Not so with Griffin. He has created a pretty deep and complicated character in Charley Castillo. This is the first one of what is called the Presidential Agent Novels. Castillo is a decorated army officer working for the director of Homeland Security and the President asks him personally to follow up on the disappearance of a plane from an airport in Angola. This sets off a huge, inter-agency, global search for this plane. Terrorists, shady Russian arms dealers, the FBI, the Philadelphia police, the CIA, the NSA, Delta Force, and Castillo’s ultra-cool half-brother are involved. It’s an excellent story.

Besides the story, I love Griffin’s methods. First of all, there’s a ton, I mean a ton, of dialogue. The story rages along with conversations on cell phones, radios, and fact-to-face. He often will only let you hear one side of the phone conversation because it’s usually interrupting another conversation happening at the same time.

Second, there is a lot of first-person thinking going on. The reader knows it’s one of the characters thinking because he just italicizes it. It’s often a conversation within a conversation but very easy to follow. I really liked the technique a lot.

And finally, he just peppers this thing with interesting, humorous, and often touching military stories. They are not necessarily part of the plot line, but added to expand on a certain issue. I have to believe they are based on the truth. For instance, he tells the story of an ex-military guy that becomes a millionaire after starting a hi-tech communications company and eventually donates some serious communications equipment to Delta Force because he feels duty bound to do so. It was really a cool short story that I did not see coming.

I can’t wait to read the other books in this series. In fact, I may grab another Clancy or Ludlum along the way. I am not sure why I have forsaken the spy/international intrigue/military intelligence novel. But I think they’re back in.

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books

Old Man’s War

If you recall, the last time I tangled with sci-fi, it didn’t turn out that great. Well, I think I’ve made amends with the genre because this one turned out fine. Here is the route I took to the point of purchase:

  1. Read this article in the University of Chicago magazine about John Scalzi.
  2. Grabbed the feed to his blog, Whatever, in my Google Reader.
  3. Heard Dave Itzkoff talk about Scalzi on the NYT Book Review podcast.
  4. Purchased this book in paperback at Borders on Clybourn and Webster.

There was a lot of pressure on Mr. Scalzi because I was pumped about this book. His blog is fun to read and the accolades for the guy on all fronts are numerous. This is his first book and it was nominated for the ultimate award in sci-fi, the Hugo. I had very high expectations. Not to worry though, it was a trip worth taking and it exceeded my expectations considerably. It’s a great read and very manageable for someone who rarely reads sci-fi.

Here’s the plot. Earth is only one of many planets habited by humans. To protect all these humans, there is this interstellar group called the Colonial Defense Force (CDF). The main character, John Perry, joins the CDF when he turns 75. That happens to be the minimum age for joining up, but don’t worry, your body gets totally rejuvenated through some genetic mumbo jumbo. What ensues is a good amount of military sci-fi, but there is a heckuva lot more.

I just sit back in awe at Scalzi’s creativity. You can do stuff with sci-fi that you can’t do with regular fiction. Anything is fair game and it just makes for a ton of fun. For sure, it’s a lot more than hi-tech weaponry and virtually indestructible aliens. There is a lot of humor, a little romance, some physics, and a perspective on the victories and horrors of war.

Not that strangely, it’s part of a trilogy. What is the magic in a trilogy? All these sci-fi fantasy books seem to come in trilogies because I guess it beats writing a 1,000 page book. Plus, you charge pretty much the same for a 1,000 pager versus 300 pager, so you may make more money. But why doesn’t anybody do a quartet or a quintuple or something. It could be because the Dune trilogy really started to suck when Frank Herbert decided to do a second, follow-up trilogy. And look at Star Wars, that follow-up, pre-trilogy was kind of bad. I have a feeling that Scalzi will stay true to his trilogy because he just seems like the type of dude to do so.

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books

The Art of the Start

I have been reading a lot of blogs lately and one that I keep coming back to is Guy Kawasaki’s How to Change the World. It has a lot of practical content on entrepreneurship, marketing, and management. Much of it relates to the tech industry because he manages a tech venture fund and is a former Apple exec. The blog is interesting enough so I bought one of his books.

He claims that this book is specifically geared towards starting a business, a not-for-profit, or a new product in an established company. He is stretching it with the not-for-profit and established company claim. I would only read this book if you’re slaving away in your garage on the next YouTube and you’re wondering what the next steps are.

Here is my diagram:

The Art of the Start

This diagram is not quite as involved as my diagrams for Execution and Blue Ocean Strategy. It’s a different style than those. This book is not very theoretical and is written kind of like his blog, just a bulleted brain dump of his thoughts, which I think is appropriate for covering the topic of starting a business. He is just grazing the surface of a broad range of topics which is what the person in the garage needs most.

For sure however, that person in the garage is going to have to shortly recognize when they need additional business knowledge. If capital is scarce and bootstrapping is the route taken, much more focus on running the business is going to be required. That means being clear that your personnel policies, marketing strategy, operational model, and financial infrastructure are sound. In this case, Kawasaki’s book will still be a great start, but will need to be supplemented quickly with more general business learning.

If the garage owner has a compelling enough idea and capital flows freely, they may never need to think about running a business because the capital provider may very well bring in a CEO. In this situation, the inventor can stay on and concentrate on the technical and creative side of things or take the money, buy a bigger garage, and start working on the next big thing.

These are extremes, but in either case, this book is a solid start that can be consumed in a matter of hours. So get started if you want to get started.

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books

For One More Day

I grew up 90 miles south of Detroit and if you wanted real sports news in my town, you went to the local magazine store and picked up the Detroit Free Press. So my first experience with Mitch Albom was reading his regular column in the Free Press. Around the same time, I was also an avid reader of the Sporting News, which was a much different beast than its current form. Heck, Larry King and Furman Bisher had weekly columns in the Sporting News. These journalists have taken different routes to fame and the only one that stayed true to his sports writing roots was Furman Bisher I think. Albom still dabbles in sports, but I am betting that most of his cash flow comes from book deals.

This is Albom’s third non-sports book. I read Tuesdays with Morrie but did not read The Five People You Meet in Heaven. I liked Tuesdays with Morrie. I liked this book.

It’s the story of Chick Benetto, a guy who’s having a really bad day. You see, he just found out that his daughter got married and didn’t invite him to the wedding. This, after a long spell of family problems that started about eight years previous when his mother died. And man, he really mistreated his mother while she was alive. He was kind of an ass actually. So, he tries to kill himself by getting drunk and driving like a crazy man back to the home he grew up in. He runs off the road and rolls the car a couple of times, then walks the last few miles. When he gets to his home, his dead mother is there, just acting likes it’s a regular day. He gets to spend the day with her and sort things out. It’s touching.

This is a worthy theme. The point is, you should be thinking about how you’ve treated your loved ones and if you need to make amends, DO IT NOW! That’s part of the role of art, to get a certain point across that does not slap you in the face as you go about your day. Sometimes it takes a work of fiction to get some clarity. Or maybe a good movie. Or maybe a painting or a play.

If this theme of “return” interests you, I have another option for you. Go check out the movie Volver, with Penelope Cruz. My wife and I just saw it the other day. Very good. The similarities to Albom’s book are eerie, but Volver goes about getting the point across much differently. Pedro Almodóvar wrote and directed it and he adds a lot more peaks and valleys to the story. Also, Albom’s book has a somber tone throughout but Almodóvar throws in more humor and a much darker twist than Albom’s. In the end, notwithstanding that one’s a book and one’s a movie, I think Volver digs a little deeper into the mother/child relationship and leaves more of a lasting impression.

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books

The Rest of the Iceberg

I have always been interested in this guy. My interest is rooted in a foggy memory of him quitting the football team at Ohio State (now The Ohio State University) back in the early 90’s because they would not let him study enough. I thought, wow, this guy must have some standards. He talks about this incident and takes much of the burden on himself. Smith admits that he skipped classes in early summer and wanted to back out of certain workouts so he could catch up. This caused him to butt heads with Coach Cooper and the new emphasis on physical conditioning, so Smith just quit. It was a completely uncool move by Smith and I actually feel sorry for Coach Cooper and his assistant, both of whom were implicated by a scathing SI article. But then again, Cooper was a bumbling idiot when it came to football.

Smith is arrogant, I’m talking really arrogant. But, I didn’t expect anything different from this book. He’s very intelligent with great athletic gifts. He starred at Ohio State and in the NFL. He’s very accomplished and this is, after all, his autobiography, so just by the fact that he undertook this project means he probably has some sort of “exaggerated sense of his own importance” (Mac OSX dictionary). It’s a pretty basic retelling of his life. Well, at least the first 181 pages are. The last 40 pages are Smith sounding off on a variety of topics that he is pretty well-versed in. These topics range from why athletes are not overpaid to religion in schools.

Let me analyze a couple quotes from the book.

The college scouts were making regular stops at the school (his high school) and my list of favorites was narrowed to five: Ohio State, Michigan, Miami (Florida), USC, and UCLA. I thought these schools would give me the chance to excel both on the field and in the classroom. I had wanted to be a doctor since I was a young boy and all of these universities had highly rated medical schools.

I guess that last sentence portrays why Notre Dame was not on the list, they don’t have a medical school. But why not consider them Robert? It’s less than four hours from your home, has a great football program (in the middle of the Holtz revival), and is highly respected academically. Maybe it was because you knew you would not see the field with Ricky Watters, Jerome Bettis, Rodney Culver, and Tony Brooks competing for carries. Hmmm, just a thought, but maybe I’m the arrogant one.

How about this one regarding “overpaid athletes,” quoted in the book from a USA Today article that he wrote.

If Americans didn’t spend so much time watching and reading about sports, then athletes wouldn’t be paid as much as they are. It’s a shame, but I’m sure more Americans know who the center for the LA Lakers is than those who know who the Senate majority leader is.

Well, I can’t really take issue with this. It could be because I never complain about overpaid athletes since my top two spectator sports are professional golf and college football. In golf, participants are paid for performance. In college football, participants are not paid. So, I guess I don’t have anything to complain about. Cool.

Or, it could be that I don’t take issue with this because I don’t know who the Senate Majority leader is (Harry Reid). But then again, I don’t know who the center for he LA Lakers is (Andrew Bynum). What does that make me (don’t say village idiot)?

I don’t recommend this book. There are much better football books out there and I think of this as a niche book that may be interesting to people from Ohio or people that want marijuana legalized. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy it. I liked it because even though I don’t agree with many of Smith’s views, they are thought provoking. Additionally, I do love college football and there was a lot of good stuff here that I did not know. It was good just to see Tyrone Willingham’s name because Ty was Smith’s first running backs coach when Smith started with Vikings. I always liked Ty.

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Skinny Dip

This is a novel of suspense, humor, and satire, not necessarily in that order. For me though, the humor is the most memorable of these three ingredients. Hiaasen is just damn funny and I found myself cracking out a laugh even when I was away from the book. Something would cause me to think about the book and I would just start laughing.

For example, you kind of have to be there, but the main character, Mick Stranahan, has occasion to make phony blackmail calls to one of the villains. Now when Mick makes these calls, he imitates the voice of either Charlton Heston or Jerry Lewis. This, for some reason, has caused me to break into a fit of laughing no less than three times in the last 48 hours. Hiaasen plays these things up, then refers to them occasionally throughout the book. It is pure, comic genius as far as I am concerned…but I do have a warped sense of humor, so take it with a grain of salt.

The satire in this book is priceless also. Here are few things that Hiaasen makes fun of in a sinister, condescending, and satisfying way:

  • Cruise ships
  • Viagra
  • Condo associations
  • Real estate developments

Another theme in this book, that Hiaasen really hammers on, is the destruction of Florida’s Everglades. I am very attentive when listening to environmental issues, so it made the book even more interesting. It may bother some serious polluters though, so if you are one of those, you may want to stay away.

If you want though, you can just read this as a suspense/crime novel. It’s about a woman from Boca Raton who gets tossed overboard from a cruise ship by her scumbag husband. She gets saved by a bale of pot floating in the ocean and eventually winds up on a private island inhabited only by the aforementioned ex-cop, and hermit, Mick. They hatch a plan to get revenge on the scumbag husband and the fun begins.

It all takes place in South Florida also. I love South Florida. I refer to South Florida as the “Southwest Michigan” of Florida; it’s that great.

This is only my second Hiaasen book, and I plan on reading all of them before I die. I think I’m also going to find his column at the Miami Herald online and start reading it.