Recently in reading Category

Michael Port, author of a number of bestselling sales-guru business books, has now come out with a pocket volume called The Think Big Manifesto: Think You Can’t Change Your Life (and the World?) Think Again.

I like the arresting graphic design of the book (a publicist sent me an advance copy) but was somewhat wary of the bold marketing language on the wrapper. Still, I found on opening the book that I was drawn in by the author’s cool, knowing style and I prepared myself to be convinced.

I started reading the book, nodding my head: I agreed with just about everything I read. The prose voice is somewhat breathless, though, and I had trouble staying focused on the book’s flow. As brief as it is, I noticed myself skimming ahead to the summarizing statements.

I found myself agreeing with all of the specific advice in the book and wondering whether I can (or do) actually follow it myself. What most of it comes down to is daring to think big and avoiding the doubts and negativity and small thinking that can so often hold us back.

I like this kind of thing, though I am also wary of it. That is, I want self-help, breakthrough, artistic and entrepreneurial leaps, but I have also seen a lot of snake oil and easy answers in my day. So it’s love/hate with this type of thing for me, and sometimes I adore it (The Power of Now, The War of Art, Money & the Meaning of Life) and other times it doesn’t stick.

For all of the books of this ilk I’ve devoured, where are my masterpieces, my killer apps? I’m still waiting to see if this one will take.

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman

My review

Over on the Well, in the public Inkwell topic, I’m interviewing my pal Nick Meriwether about his new book, All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead, a scholarly work looking at the Dead phenomenon from a variety of perspectives.

You can submit questions to this interview by mailing them to inkwell AT well DOT com.

Quoting from More Alan Furst Blogging:

More Alan Furst blogging, this time from Unqualified Offerings:

Unqualified Offerings: Henry Farrell got me into a to-do for novelist Alan Furst at GWU this evening. The food was fabulous and the author did not disappoint. Controversial GWU President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg did the introduction, and it was good - the kind of informed appreciation a writer can get, if lucky, from a very smart fan. See previous Furst-blogging on this site and current Furst-blogging from Brad DeLong. Furst read a few pages from The Foreign Correspondent, which will be out in time for Father's Day - 2006. I have to say, the excerpt completely hooked me...

Now excuse me while I turn green with envy.

If anything I'd expect to see more discussion of Alan Furst in blogs. He's an incredible writer and as good as Patrick O'Brian is at conjuring up a different time in all its nuances. Now that I've read all his books I'm always impatient for the next one, and other supposedly similar writers out there (not naming any names) don't quite scratch the same itch.

Quoting from The Poor Man: He Sat Right Down And Wrote Himself A Letter:

[I]t is a waste of time to teach utterly uninterested schoolkids how to calculate reaction rates and trajectories of cannonballs and so on, things which are going to be about as useful to most of them in the grown-up world as being able to name all of the seven dwarfs, instead of teaching them A) what is science, B) what isn't science, C) how to tell one from the other.

The result of this is that 99% of journalists, and the public at large, think that science is just one rather boring topic for "Crossfire"-style argumentation, where there's one side screaming one set of lies and the other side screaming another and everyone hates America and/or babies and now here's some ads for Matt Damon movies and dick pills.

Thanks to Gwen, I've found gujari girl:

I never thought the first person in Walnut Creek to whom I'd defend Oakland would be an Indian guy from New York!

I'm now two L(G)L behind on photos. If I post mine we'll have triangulation on a few of the scenes from the other day.

In following the Plame Affair updates this morning I was reading the comments following a post (about evil Bob Novak) at Kevin Drum's site.

One comment mentioned the Philip Agee story. I don't know much about it, but it may have inspired the law that was allegedly broken from within the White House, and it seems to have stirred up the queen mother and retired presidential dad at the time. Here's Mitchell Freeman's take:

[T]he ex-CIA agent Agee ... defends himself by saying [of] Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Greece he identified in Counterspy magazine a few months before Greek terrorists killed Welch in 1975 (these terrorists also killed Greek officials during the then-military dictatorship in Greece), [that]

1. [He] lived in the same house as the previous station chief, who was already known in political circles as CIA;
2. And ... really was known in many Greek circles to be CIA before Agee identified him in his new magazine.

Ironically, Agee sued Barbara Bush in the early 1990s because her autobiography named Agee as a reason Welch was killed. And did Barbara fight this traitor, as most Republican insiders still call Agee? Nope. SHE INSTEAD AGREED TO REMOVE THE CHARGE FROM HER BOOK.

I've trimmed away the Novakula material and only left in the Bar Bush stuff because excising it would reverse the spin (reaccusing Agee), when I know nothing of the details, except that the Heinleiners online have taken to asking why the lefties suddenly care about national security blah blah blah and where were they when Phil Agee blah blah blah.

OK, this is not the place for politics. However, this did all remind me of one of my favorite Don DeLillo books, The Names. I don't want to give away the plot and so much of the story and the setting and the descriptions and the imagery is so detailed and fine that I merely recommend the book to anyone who hasn't read it and say to those who have, isn't it great?

Oh, and the plot vaguely resembles some parts of the Welch story above. Did everyone else already know that but me?

In People Like Us, noninsane conservative columnist David Brooks writes

Maybe somewhere in this country there is a truly diverse neighborhood in which a black Pentecostal minister lives next to a white anti-globalization activist, who lives next to an Asian short-order cook, who lives next to a professional golfer, who lives next to a postmodern-literature professor and a cardiovascular surgeon. But I have never been to or heard of that neighborhood. Instead, what I have seen all around the country is people making strenuous efforts to group themselves with people who are basically like themselves.

All my life, I've turned down the page at the corner of the book I'm reading whenever a passage of writing strikes me in some particular way: as writing itself, or because it confirms or disputes some ongoing argument I'm having with myself. The gesture is vestigial, the first step in highlighting or underlining, annotating or footnoting. But the endnotes never come.

Often on re-reading a book I reencounter old dog ears. Most of the time I can tell what I was trying to save. In some books the dog ears come thick and fast, even overlapping at times.

I think now when I finish reading a book or when I pick up an old favorite, I might just comb through the dog ears, find the intended passages and post them here in this blog, in this new "dog ears" category.