Review: The Power

The Power by Naomi Alderman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Through some fast-paced evolution caused by a rogue chemical treatment, a new organ appears in females that enables them to emit a shocking electrical pulse like an electric eel. The book follows through the consequences of this change, with women suddenly becoming physically more powerful than men. The book provides plenty to think about as the power in society and in individual interactions shifts to be one-sided. The question isn’t if the women take advantage of their new capabilities, it is how. This is one of those books that would be good to read before beginning a future scenario planning session to knock your assumptions sidways. The book goes beyond the first order effects of personal interactions to talk about societal changes, and ends discussing the moves made by some men to regain their power. Quite an interesting book, although I would have liked more stories to illustrate different aspects of this change, and a more detailed ending. Readable and fun, to a point.

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Review: Sting-Ray Afternoons

Sting-Ray Afternoons by Steve Rushin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book had a lot going for it in my mind. First, the subject of the title, the Sting Ray bike, was something that I remember having as a kid. Mine was red, with an off-white banana seat and a three gear shifter stick bolted to the crossbar, in a location notorious for causing damage to boys when they had to stop quickly or ran into something. It was the coolest bike in the neighborhood. I figured this book would bring back these memories by the author riffing on his own memories. The author is about my age, so I expected the experiences to be similar. And, strangely enough, the author’s father worked for the same company my father worked for. The author’s Dad sold the tapes that my Dad helped manufacture. So another similarity. And lastly, I noticed in a quick word search of the book before I read it that the author lived in Lisle, Illinois early on, and that’s where I live now. These were why I chose to read this book, and my expectations were to get a large dose of nostalgia like watching The Wonder Years.

Here the book was hit or miss. The author method here was to riff a little on his life experiences as a youngster in the 60s and 70s, then take some aspect and drill down into an encyclopedic review of said topic I found some of these long asides interesting, but some not. For instance, the author talks of Christmas catalogs and their impact on kids toy requests for Christmas. I found the catalog info interesting, but the others were less so. And surprisingly there wasn’t as much about bikes as I would have expected given the title and the true need for a book about those classic and dangerous bikes.

I also ran across one of my pet peeves while listening to this audiobook. When a publisher goes to the effort and expense of creating an audiobook, I always hope that they do their due diligence and figure out how to correctly pronounce the names in the book. The audiobook I finished just prior to this had mentioned the neighboring Chicago suburb of Naperville and had somehow mispronounced that city name. But Lisle can be more difficult. It should be pronounced like Lyle Wagonner pronounced his name, with a long I, rhyming with “while”. Sometimes I get cold calls that pronounce it with a short I and with the s, rhyming with “whistle”. That’s wrong, but somewhat common and sounds humorous, and you can see the earnestness behind the person taking their best shot. In the audio for this book, I believe it was pronounced Lale, rhyming with “pail”. That lack of respect for the author’s home town lowered my enjoyment.

Overall I enjoyed the author's personal nostalgia anecdotes, but found the more historical discussions hit or miss. Any deeper meaning, or story, didn't stick. 2.5 stars


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Review: Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon

Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow, I was not expecting the work that Gladwell accomplished here. He takes a series of discussions with Paul Simon, as well as other musicians, music producers, and friends, and provides a pretty complete book focusing on Paul Simon’s music and writing process. You get the details that fans may not have heard before. But this is really about the creative process. You go deep into the process Simon uses to create music. He talks about it, he plays the parts of songs that influenced his songs. When there’s a question about how some songs sounded the way they did, Gladwell brings in the sound engineer to describe the echo chamber used 50 years ago. There is so much more here on audio than you could get on paper. It is much more of an experience than just a read.

I was reading another book the same week when I was listening to this. I was reading “The Power of Myth” by Joseph Campbell. This book was also created by stringing together snippets from interviews. But I felt the Campbell book was very disjointed, jumping topics from paragraph to paragraph, only loosely following the organization set out by chapter headings. I noticed Gladwell’s hand at moving some stories out of chronological sequence to further discussion on a topic, and even repeating some snippets. But all toward a more cohesive whole. Gladwell shows his mastery of production here. My next step may well be to compare the video of Campbell’s interviews, or better, more modern documentaries.


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Review: Interior Chinatown

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I chose to join a college alumni book club in reading this book, but I listened to the audiobook version instead of reading. I’m not sure that was a good choice. The issue is that this book is written, from what I gather from other reviews, in the format of a screenplay. When listening, you don’t get all the context you would get with a visual page in the format of a screenplay, so it is more difficult to follow the action. To me, the story seemed more to blend screenplay and narrative, sometimes making each part easy to define, and other times moving from one into the other without warning. You could be in a long narrative then end up hearing stage instructions. The audio does use different voices for the different characters, so there is some context, but it’s not always what you originally think. This kind of organization was confusing, but it also was interesting. It reminded me of some movies that changed the focus from personal story to background story – I kept thinking of “Pink Floyd’s The Wall” for some reason.

Most book reviews describe how on the face the book is about how Asian actors are pigeonholed into roles, and there are a hierarchy of roles leading to the top, Kung Fu Man. As the protagonist goes through his career he notices other roles that he is pigeonholed into, even beyond acting. An interesting take on self-imposed and societal stereotypes that apply to us all. Weird, but fun to read.


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Review: The Power of Myth

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was not at all what I was expecting. I’ve had a very good college mythology class, and was expecting something akin to that. This felt more like an Eckhart Tolle book, with a writer full of himself and willing to come up with new terms to provide an academic-sounding answer to every question and to overcome any objections. And Campbell isn’t really the writer of this. This is a choppy edit of the transcript of Bill Moyers talking to Campbell for their PBS show. The narration is presented with often long monologues by one or the other on a topic. This would be fine, but the next exchange could be on an entirely unrelated topic. I found it difficult to follow and to tie the ping-pong discussion to the main concepts of the chapters. It feels like this was rushed to press to capitalize on the popularity of the TV show.

Another indication of the book being not quite there was the highlighting in my used copy. It had obviously been used as a textbook and had some highlighting. But there were so few passages highlighted, and with no semblance of importance to the chosen passages, that I would have to say the former owner didn’t know what to make of this either.

I am very surprised at my reaction to this book. I’ve heard about it for many years and was looking forward to finally spending time reading it. It just didn’t seem right. I would hope that Campbell’s books that aren’t edited together questions and answers would be more interesting. Skip this book. Perhaps the PBS shows are a better bet, and perhaps the shows are what people are thinking of when they rate this highly.


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Review: Hello, Habits: A Minimalist's Guide to a Better Life

Hello, Habits: A Minimalist's Guide to a Better Life by Fumio Sasaki
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve read quite a few books on habits over the past few years. It seems this is a cottage industry for non-fiction writers that want to write more. This was another. In total, it seemed much like the others that I’ve read. There are many personal stories from the writer and there are some suggestions as to how to build or break habits. This had a different, more personal voice than I’ve seen in other books though. It seems the author kept a diary and used this book as a way to reflect on his life and the habits that have impacted him. He even shares his bad habit of drinking too much and his efforts to successfully eliminate this habit. He also talks about food and exercise, especially running, quite a bit – no surprise. But he also talks at the end of the book about habits of kindness, which was a nice way to end his musings. You get a lot of the personal in the beginning and the ending, which I found the most interesting parts of the book. The bulk of the book is going through a couple of long lists relating to making habits and the values of habits. Here he mixed personal observations with research and quotes. I was surprised that many of the quotes were from William James, famed psychology writer before Freud, and Haruki Murakami, famous writer. The James quotes implied to me that Sasaki started his research on the topic with the basics, and maybe focused on them for the scientific aspects of his book. Or maybe James quotes come up often when Googling habits… The Murakami quotes and mentions show the personal research the author is relating, as Murakami is also a runner who book “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” is in a similar vein.

Overall, nothing really mind-bending, but it is a mostly comfortable read. I listened to the audio version of this book, which was slowly read, with long breaks between thoughts that worked well for allowing something to sink in, even at 2x speed. I am rarely happy with long lists in an audiobook, and this one has two long lists. They were too long to really keep track of, but in this case the items, 50 in the longest list, were more like short chapters where the topics merged into other chapters. The organization wasn’t something that you needed to rely on to understand the point of the book. So that worked OK here, which was good because the points all ran together when listening.

I forgot to carp on this in the first version of the review:
I should also mention a pet peeve that occurred with this audiobook. I greatly enjoy when the places I live in or grew up in show up in books. I'm from a small town and live in a small suburb. I think this background makes me more interested in familiar locations showing up in books. It helps me feel a comradery with the author. So this book mentions the neighboring suburb, Naperville, as a place where some research took place. Naperville is pronounced with a long a, but the narrator pronounced it with a short a, like taking a nap. I've made this point before, but I know producing an audiobook is an expensive proposition for a publisher, and there often aren't more than a handful of proper names in a non-fiction book (that goes for this one). Why can't they get the pronunciations correct? This was the second audiobook in a row that mentioned one of my cities, and flubbed the name.

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Review: Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less by Michael Hyatt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s another book on how to focus to be productive. This is like most that I’ve read. Nothing much jumped out at me compared to the many others that I’ve read. One thing, though. This was written seemingly aimed at managers – people who have the ability to delegate their work to underlings. I notice other reviews pointing this out as a bad thing – it doesn’t mean much unless you can delegate. However, I disagree with that. As a career underling, I found it quite interesting to see how my manager could become more productive were they to use Hyatt’s common ideas. For example, one thing that Hyatt does is to suggest a delineation of delegated job duties and responsibilities, from a request to do research, to a request for research and opinion, to a complete outsourcing of a task or a full responsibility for a project or a process. (There are a few other levels in between those in the book.) I liked how Hyatt created this hierarchy of delegation, and now I know that when my boss delegates something to me in a vague way (which is the usual way in my experience), I must ask for details and specifics of the request along the lines that Hyatt mentions here.

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