Hi all,
The usual roundup of what I finished reading in November. As was the case in August, there is a big gap in terms of finish dates. This time, I'll cite my own post-election thinking as the culprit for taking away some of my free time from reading. I'm still thinking about it, really, but once I'm through I'll cobble together some kind of post.
But all that is for another day. Let's get back on track.
Without any further ramblings...
*The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman (10/21)
First things first, I'll start with this one from October that I forgot to include in last month's review post. Chapman's basic premise is that everyone processes acts of love differently. He groups these acts into five general categories- words of affirmation, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and physical touch- and notes that, for most people, one of these acts tend to resonate more than the others.
I thought this book was brilliant, a conclusion I am somewhat surprised by. Though I have enjoyed books with similar titles in the past- notably The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People- in general I find these books focus a little too heavily on the nuts and bolts of the habits/languages/etc counted in the title at the expense of clearly explaining the intuition behind the main idea. (1)
This was not the case here. Chapman does well to bring the skeptical reader around to his idea, mixing examples and reasoning as needed to clarify potentially confusing ideas. He also steps back, almost philosophically, to detail how love is a choice, freely given, and that like many such things the choice to love comes unnaturally to us. To succeed in any unnatural venture requires skills. Thus, it may be that learning a new 'love language' is among the skills that must be learned.
How does someone determine their own love language? The simplest way is to think about when one feels most loved. If that does not work, perhaps studying one's criticisms is a possible approach. Chapman cites criticisms as an ineffective way to express a need for love. Chapman also includes a self-test in the book which will, if taken honestly, reveal one's love language. (2)
I cannot read such a book without considering how it applies to me. My conclusion is that words of affirmation is my love language although quality time checks in at a close second. I went about this in a negative way- I thought back to what stung or hurt me over the years. I recognized that, although I likely received useless gifts or pointless service at different points in the course of my life, I do not have much recall at all for these events. (So to those who've managed to find me substandard gifts over the years- congratulations, you are off the hook for it seems I have been counting the thoughts.)
On the other hand, my recall for negative comments and distracted time is pretty strong. I think I am much more forgiving, though, with the latter. I accepted long ago that people will focus on the TV if it is on, absent-mindedly scroll through their phone during quiet moments, or zone out during a conversation. My tendency to shut out people who've said hurtful things to me in the past makes me suspect that there is something true about words that runs just as far in the positive direction.
*Long Life by Mary Oliver (11/1)
A very short volume mixing essays with poetry, I found Long Life interesting without necessarily being memorable. As many of her longtime readers note, Oliver writes to illuminate the beauty she observes in the world around her. This book is a collection that earns the description with each page.
I enjoyed some of her observations about writing. For Oliver, the empathetic writer is the one who gently suggests what requires a longer look. This requires mastery of tone for getting the tone wrong means nothing else will be right.
The idea I liked the most- the owl is peaceful until he is hungry. Aren't we all?
*Before I Die by Candy Chang (11/7)
One day, Candy Chang wrote 'Before I die...' on a converted wall of an abandoned home in her New Orleans neighborhood. Passerby used chalk to complete the sentence in any way they chose. The project spread as people all over the globe took up the idea and erected or converted walls of their own. This book chronicled many examples of these walls.
The walls collect a wide spectrum of human longings, ideas, and vulnerabilities. I found most notable the attainability of so many ideas on a surface level- 'I want to get a tattoo' or 'I want to go to France' or 'I want to be myself', so on. The sheer volume of such wishes reveals how challenging life becomes at times- for many, even seeking out the simple experiences we know will nourish us becomes a daunting task.
I found it hard to understand the nearly impossible wishes, ideas like 'meet George Washington' or 'fly to the moon on a sled'. Perhaps these writers felt completely boxed in by the rules of physics, time, or reality. I suppose in that sense the use of a wall to collect these desires was most appropriate.
When I first read Before I Die in 2015, I found it very moving. This more recent reading did not rekindle that feeling. I think this reflects something about my changes in my worldview over that time. (3)
*Fallen Leaves by Will Durant (11/8)
Durant was a significant figure in history and philosophy whose many achievements in those fields culminated with a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. A notable feature of this Pulitzer Prize winner's writing is the lack of personal ideology in his work.
This collection of short essays, published almost twenty-five years after his death, is his response to those who wished to learn more about his personal views and longed to hear him speak his mind on the subjects he spent over six decades researching and writing about.
The acknowledgment that society never plans for peace with the same attention to detail found in planning for war was a striking idea in this work. He describes the condition of peace as unnatural and concludes that, like anything unnatural, it will require dedicated effort from society's greatest thinkers and planners. Without the constant attention of first-rate minds, Durant sees limits to a peaceful society's capacity to resist the never ending incentives for war.
I'll leave it at that for today. A fuller recap is required for this book. I'll save that for a better time in the near future.
*Just Kids by Patti Smith (11/26)
This memoir details Smith's relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe and their experience as poor, struggling artists in the New York of the late sixties and early seventies. Smith's winning of the 2010 National Book Award (nonfiction) for this memoir, her first work of prose, underlies her significant versatility as an artist.
I tried writing my thoughts about this book for nearly an hour. I gave up upon realizing that I was going nowhere. Unlike my experience with even the stupidest of books (did anyone catch my post last week about the Animorphs?) I found little here in the way of the distilled insight that so easily translates to material for this space.
Early on in the book, Smith describes a revelation that 'to be an artist was to see what others could not'. The line sums it up best for me, both in the reading process and in trying to articulate it here.
I felt many times throughout Just Kids that I was right there, witnessing and sharing the experiences of Smith's life with her. But at other points, I felt a little like an outsider. No matter how well-written a given passage, there was no guarantee that I, too, could see what Smith saw.
I don't think this outsider feeling is an unintentional result. Smith's emotions are not as open as I perhaps expected from such a memoir. This served to keep me at arm's length from her inner life and allowed my attention as a reader to focus on the various scenes, people, and work that she involved herself in.
I also thought her progression from wandering the streets homeless to recording her first studio album comes a little suddenly. Surely, the work involved in achieving such success merits closer examination in a memoir-length work. It did not occur to me until the final pages that this, too, was likely intentional, or at very least an honest reflection of what mattered most to Smith about this time in her life.
Overall, I found it a thoroughly enjoyable read. I only knew Smith from a very limited sampling of her music and from reading M Train earlier this year. I expect this experience, covering her initial, formative years as an artist, to prove beneficial in helping me see more connections and understand her work as I come across it again in the coming years.
*Dear Data by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec (11/27)
The premise of this book is that the two authors send each other one postcard per week about their lives. Each week features a different theme- alone time, sounds, urban wildlife, etc- and the catch is that instead of describing this information in writing, these two will visualize it through a drawing of their data. I enjoyed this one but I would not recommend it to anyone not seriously interested in drawing or in finding new ways to analyze the tiny details of their own lives.
Given the highly-personalized nature of the information here, this was a tough read to draw any major insights from. Both authors reference at times how the act of measuring their own behavior served to influence their actual behavior. That's a common complaint of many who struggle with the basic truism that what gets measured gets managed.
I thought a number of times that the artistic quality of these postcards came at the cost of clarity in the information they were based on. This was almost always the case anytime more than ten colors were used in a given postcard. I should acknowledge that, since this book was about artistic quality, my comment is more a generalization of what I consider the best way to convey information through graphics rather than anything regarding what I consider 'artful'.
Again, a fun read if perhaps not immediately useful to me. If you are on the fence about checking it out, I believe the blog of the same name has some examples that may prove helpful in your decision.
*The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson (11/28)
This is the fifth (I think) book I've read from Nelson in this calendar year. As I did with the others, I enjoyed this book tremendously. The broad idea here is to examine cruelty. The result is a wide-ranging work that uses her leaps of insight to balance the findings of her extensive research. (4)
Nelson makes a number of insights regarding the implication of a society that brings together cruelty and entertainment. This combination, at times, forces viewers to wonder if they are truly just spectators to the act or if they are somehow responsible for its existence by virtue of contributing to its demand. It also raises the question of how the entertainment one enjoys relates to one's own inherent nature. A person who seeks out a violent movie need not be violent- but then how can this person enjoy the film? I think some football fans are working out similar feelings as awareness of the sport's mental health consequences increases.
Nelson considers the point at which the passive bystander become complicit in the act he or she fails to intervene in. One observation Nelson makes is that, time and again, humans prove that their capacity to absorb cruelty and move on exceeds their desire to alter routine behavior, even when made aware of how their habits are perhaps contributing in some microscopic way to the event in question. With this thought in mind, it is ironic that a common public reaction to scandal or wrongdoing is the assertion- 'they ought to be ashamed of themselves'- a perfectly reasonable one until it is considered that those with the capacity to feel shame in their cruelty likely never act in such a way to begin with.
There is a spurious logic pattern that cruelty perhaps falls into. Accept too many cruel acts and one starts to consider it inherent. It feeds into the change-phobic side of us that what we were is what we will always be. Though people have been cruel to extraordinary degrees throughout history, past actions should serve as no predictor of behavior.
Cruelty is always divisive. What one understands as required another will see as unnecessary. The way toward a world without such gratuitous suffering is one where divided groups are brought together. A unified examination of whether the accepted means are truly necessary will foster progress toward this most desirable of ends.
A couple of other scattered thoughts to finish up with. I liked Nelson's thought about kindness- the ability to bear the vulnerability of others. She also makes an interesting comment about the expression 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. I agree that a second look is perhaps a better fit with modern times, though I find the suggested 'do unto others as they would have you unto them is' somewhat unwieldy.
*So, what next?
December is shaping up as a decent reading month. Longtime favorite Tim Harford is back with a new book, Messy, perhaps lazily framed as a counter-argument to Marie Kondo's The Life Changing Magic Of Tidying Up, and Simone Weil's First and Last Notebooks is off to a good start.
As the end of the month approaches, I'll prepare a post about my favorite books from this year. It seems a lot of publications post this kind of thing before Christmas (it might even be appropriate in some cases). I tend to read right until the ball drops so I cannot afford such a luxury.
Until then, expect the usual mix of nonsense and exploration.
Back on Friday. Thanks again for reading.
All the best,
Tim
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. First things first is a 'seven habit'...
I wondered, given the similar structure of the book, if one drew on the other for its layout ideas. Covey's Seven Habits was published just a year prior to Chapman's Love Languages, so I think the possibility is remote.
Chapman, like Covey, cashed in on the success of his bestseller. Some of the titles are eye-catching, so to speak, but having read Covey's family-specific edition of the Seven Habits, I think I'll pass on Chapman's follow ups. It seems very likely that these books will just repeat what was clearly described in the original.
I could be wrong about this, of course, but I'm willing to be. These little trade-offs define the difficult task of choosing what to read next. As a coffee mug I 'inherited' from my mother states this conundrum best- 'So many books, so little time!'
2. No one told me there was going to be a test!
I thought the layout of this test was pretty good. It was thirty questions, each giving the test-taker one of two options. Each response correlated to one of the five love languages. After studying it briefly, I realized it was like a tournament where each concept is pitted against the other in round-robin fashion until a final winner was determined.
Since there are five languages, ten questions are sufficient to correctly rank the five options after one round-robin. With thirty total questions, I suppose this 'tournament' was structured in a triple-round robin fashion.
3. No one cares, just tell us what you got!
As I noted above for Love Languages, I eventually think about myself as I read books like this. What would I write on this wall?
Theoretically, I should just write down what I'm doing with my life that day. Time is short, you know? Do what you love and all that.
But I think I am like many others in that I rarely spend a day doing the things I deeply long to do before I die. (Except write blog posts for you guys, of course.)
The most likely candidates after several seconds of deep thought are as follows:
*Quirky-morbid funny (I'll double check that I put on deodorant)
*Much less in my control than I admit (adopt a kid)
*Much more in my control than I admit (raise a seeing-eye dog)
*Dull but realistic (teach myself to play piano)
*Selfless yet egotistical (catch a baby/human that fell from several stories up)
*Pointless protest (see the Green Line run properly, once)
4. So, did you save the best for last?
This, I suspect, is the final Nelson book I'll read this year (a stunning prediction, I know, given that I am in 100% control of such things). Though I have yet to establish a formal ranking, I know this book was not the best of them. Alas, such expressions as 'you save the best for last'- true, except when they are not.
