I really liked this book a lot. The author decided to go through a year’s worth of month-long experiments to try to be happier. To adjust her behavior in big and small ways to see if they made her feel happier day-to-day. And they did.

There’s a lot in this book, and I’m going to want to go back to it to think about the concrete actions I can take in my own life. I think it illustrates, more than anything else, a couple of ideas. First, act the way you want to feel — that will tend to reinforce. Second, being mindful and focusing on the things that are important, you can always make a difference.

I think some will view this as a bit of a hokey self-help type of book, but I didn’t read it at all like that. It’s an essay on mindfulness & intentionality, and making your life the way you want it, instead of just sliding along.

I liked this book by Sanjay, but didn’t love it. Interesting medical survey of the ways we think about death, work to prevent it. Lots of stories of surprises to doctors, of courses of therapy that are significantly more effective than the accepted conventions, etc.

I really liked this book a lot — it’s a look at our relationship with the 4 main “food fish” that we eat in huge quantities: salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna. It starts by talking about salmon farming, something that humans have been doing for something more than 500 years — I had no idea. Goes into pretty good detail about the relative merits of wild salmon fishing versus farmed salmon harvesting — although it doesn’t really make it clear at all what to buy at Whole Foods.

He makes it clear that sea bass — or, more generally, perciforms — despite their relative ubiquity, are a pretty strange choice in fish to domesticate — very tricky. (Also, there are a lot of different fish that we call sea bass, but they’re all pretty different.)

Cod, of course, was well chronicled by Mark Kurlansky in his outstanding book Cod, about 10 years ago — and Greenburg does a good job of taking that work as a baseline and extending it in the context of sustainable oceans now, and what’s happened in the Grand Banks over the past decade or so.

And it’s a bit of an ode to tuna, especially the dwindling bluefin tuna, which he asserts is one of the most incredible fish species and that we need to stop fishing now.

Anyway, great book, and with real suggestions for sustainability at the end. (In short, pick fish more suitable for farming: tra, tilapia, and the Kona kampachi.)

My mom reminded me the other day that I have sometimes, um, esoteric tastes in what I read — and I guess that’s true. But I really liked this book, and think it’s relatively rare for books to change the way you think about your relationship with the world. Very recommended.

And with sentences like this:

“The hoki is a gadiform descended from a fish that ended up in the Southern Hemisphere after the great gadiform radiation tens of millions of years ago.”

How can you not want to read more?

I’m an unapologetic lover of children’s literature — really liked the Harry Potter books, grew up with The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, and some (now) obviously horrible books by Piers Anthony.

So when I heard that my 11 year old nephew really loved these books, more than the Harry Potter books, I gave them a try. I read all 5 books, in order, but didn’t really like them very much. They’re sort of like a cross between Harry Potter and Greek mythology, but with all the action, including Mt. Olympus, centered around present day Manhattan.

What could go wrong, really?

Yeah, everything you just imagined as an answer to that last question is pretty much true. This really isn’t a very good series of books. I totally understand why my nephew liked them — they’re basically fun books with a teenager in control, with some tortured Greek mythology thrown in the mix.

Anyway, since I read all 5 books, they’re obviously not horrible, but they weren’t really what I was hoping for. The mythology is pretty dubious, but it did cause me to run down the rabbit hole on Wikipedia a few times to learn about various Titans and minor gods, so that’s not all bad.

I liked the first book in this series, Johannes Cabal, the Necromancer, pretty well.This book was pretty different — the main character is still this necromancer named Johannes Cabal, and the setting is still this sort of Victorian era steampunk type of universe. But this time instead of a Faust type story, it’s more like a locked room mystery on a blimp.

It’s weird & quirky, and not the sort of thing I generally like all that much, since it’s a little, um, overly Victorian for me, but I read this one in a weekend, and liked it pretty well.

Not for everyone, for sure, but a fun read for me.

I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how great Stross is — I think this was the wrong book to start with. It’s the sort of book that mostly made me want to reread Roger Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles (not on Kindle yet — what’s the deal with that?)

I didn’t like this one much — found the plot pretty derivative of other stuff I’ve read, didn’t like the writing much. Some good parts, but not really my favorite.

This book is a full-out assault on the ethics and principles of eating meat. Foer is one of the most talented novelists that I’ve read in the past decade, and he’s a very compelling writer. This book is a bit of why he’s become vegan himself, as well as an attack on industrial ranching and meat production, not to mention an illustration of the many ways we’re cruel to the animals that we eventually eat.

I’m not a vegetarian (or vegan) myself, although I’m trending that way. It used to be that I’d have meat for every meal — now as a family, we tend to eat vegetarian at home at least half the time. (We probably eat salmon 30% of the rest of the time, and chicken the remainder.) We’ve been looking for more recipes that use garbanzo beans and black beans — found some good ones, especially Indian dishes.

In any case, intellectually, I’m pretty sympathetic to Foer’s arguments here, and wholly in agreement that industrial ranching is a very bad development. In practice, I still eat meat that’s produced like that. I tend to think we’d be healthier with more vegetables compared to meat, it would be more sustainable globally, and would be overall ethical. I’m not quite the guy I want to be in this regard yet, but this was a good book to remind me about how I’d like to be.

For me personally, it’s acute: I don’t really even like buying books that I can’t get electronically anymore. It shows in my library — I’ve been giving away about 100-200 books a year to our public library, but still have well over 1,000 in the house. But I have more than 150 on my Kindle, after 2 1/2 years. My physical library is shrinking, my electronic one growing.

I have zero sentimentality – none - about the form of the book. I’ve noted elsewhere that what I discovered on getting my Kindle is that it isn’t particularly books that I love so much, it’s reading that I love. Novels, non-fiction works, short stories, whatever. It’s the words that I’ve always cared about, the ideas, the narratives, the characters. Not the wood pulp, the binding glue, the flashy book jackets (that often don’t have anything at all to do with the author’s intent).

But lately I’m worried that as we rush headlong into the electronic future that we’re losing something.

I think it’s pretty clear that we’re not reading as well — every reader I talk with reports that they’re not comprehending the books quite as deeply as they used to. I believe we’ll get better at reading electronically, and the format will allow better paging through and spatial memory eventually, but that’s far from obvious to me. (Most avid readers I talk with say that they can usually remember where on the page they read something — top left, lower right, in the middle, whatever — and that’s always been true for me. The reflowable digital form obviously breaks that spatial memory, and is a bit of a problem.)

But the thing I’m worried about more lately is the disappearance of books in our physical spaces. I’ve always found that when I go visit peoples’ houses that what’s on their bookshelves is a bit of a lens into their lives and their values. Almost invariably when people come over to our house for dinner, I’ll hand them a book from my shelves that they’re interested in with no expectation (or desire, actually) to get the book back.

I find it even in my own home — when I’m in the office, I’ll often notice a cluster of books about something that reminds me of a time in my life, or stokes an old curiosity, or that just makes me happy.

But now the books we have in our house don’t really represent the current me. We tend to have 3 categories: (1) kids books, (2) coffee table books, and (3) books from our past that we haven’t given away yet. I believe that will happen in most homes — and maybe it already has been, since the introduction of the television — and it makes our personal spaces much more anonymous — more screens, less deep content.

I feel the same thing as I travel around — in the airport or on airplanes, nobody can see what I’m reading. Mostly, that’s okay with me — I didn’t really want to talk to my seat neighbor about Stieg Larsson that much anyway. But it bugs me more that my wife can’t see what I’m reading — the books used to serve as an instant conversation-starter. Now the reading experience is faceless, not conversation-inviting at all.

Anyway, I’m sure we’ll replace books as a lens into our brains and lives with something else — digital picture frames? Facebook pages glowing from our walls at home?

Nevertheless, I think we’re losing something in the process. That always happens as we move from one technology to the next, but we’ve overturned a 500 year old technology in less than a decade, and it’s going to be very disorienting.

I’ve never missed reading physical books nearly as much as I miss having the physical artifacts in our world, and how so many clues to who we are are disappearing along with them.

It’s no secret that I think incredibly highly of Bob Sutton and his work. I’ve always found him to be smart, encouraging, engaging, and interesting to talk with about work and management, and find that, more than most people in the field, he’s extremely data-driven in his work. I also find that he’s got an incredible ethical framework, and is very wise about the art of management.

He’s got a new book coming in September, and I really, really like it — I think it’s his most profound and useful work to date. I’m generally not a fan of business books — I find that usually their main value is in the title (and if it’s really awesome, maybe the introduction is useful) — but this one, which I’ve read a pre-pub copy of, is great.

His last book, The No Asshole Rule, got a lot of attention, partly for the provocative title, but really more for the ideas on how much culture matters in productive workplaces. And it clearly struck a nerve with people suffering from bad or incompetent managers. His new book is a little less situated in the negative context associated with bad managers, and talks more about how to be an exceptional leader. That distinction is important — it’s obviously easy to be a bad manager, and hard to be a good one — but it’s another thing entirely to be a really exceptional leader, and Bob has gone to great lengths in this book to look at some of the world’s best leaders and really understand what sets them apart.

You can get a taste of the book in this Harvard Business Review post by Bob titled “12 Things Good Bosses Believe” — this is an extremely powerful list of things that the best managers believe.

I fall short of these ideals a lot — I imagine everyone does, really — but every single one of them is worth thinking about and striving for each and every day in the workplace. This book is a great one because it reminds me of how good great leaders can be, and I really recommend you pick it up when it comes out.

Kinzer’s written two of the most influential histories that I’ve ever read: All the Shah’s Men, an account of the CIA-led coup of Reza Shah over Mohammed Mossadeh, and Overthrow, a history of the last 100 years or so of America’s regime-change-happy foreign policy, and its disastrous consequences.

Reading All the Shah’s Men was incredibly illuminating for me — there’s a very direct line from our adventurous and damaging foreign policy under the Dulles brothers to the unstable and antagonistic situation we find ourselves in with the Middle East. I couldn’t recommend more reading that history.

In this book, he recaps a bit of that — goes through the last hundred years or so of Iranian history — but in a parallel way, also chronicles the last hundred years of Turkish history. His basic argument is that, even though Saudi Arabia and Israel are our main partners in the region, and should remain partners, the overemphasis on those two countries is strange (for reasons I’ll state in a moment) and unproductive & dangerous, and that it’s in our best interests to develop significant partnerships with both Turkey and Iran.

He spends the time on history to show that the people of both countries have a longer history of wanting democracy and trying to bring democracy to their countries than any other countries in the region — the difference being that Turkey’s march towards democracy has been mostly unbroken, while Iran’s was massively disrupted by foreign involvement in the 1950s, which created the conditions to allow the 1979 Islamic Revolution to occur.

It’s really important to note 2 things. First, he’s not arguing that the governments are more democratic than elsewhere in the region, he’s arguing that the rank and file populace have a longer history with and very strong desire for democracy. Secondly, he’s not naive about the challenges of partnering, or that many compromises would have to be made — but in his view the set of choices which could result in an enduring, positive situation are very limited, and these are the ones most in our self-interest.

I liked this book a lot, both for the histories and the policies — much to think on.

I picked this book up because it’s mentioned in an online correspondence between Jonathan Lethem (one of my very favorite authors, although I’m finding Chronic Town tough to get through and David Gates. They both clearly admire the work as a way of helping them think about their own writing, and the way that writing is changing.

It’s a funny sort of book — really a collection of about 800 numbered passages, some of which are only 3 or 4 words, some which stretch to 3 or 4 pages. Some of them are Shield’s own writing, lots of them are cribbed from other authors.

His main point is that the novel is dead. More particularly, that the constraints of the novel mean that they’re so predictable and artificial — so awkward and divorced from the pace and intensity and authenticity of modern life — that they’re uniformly unchallenging and interesting for him. More fundamentally, he argues that all writing is fiction. Non-fiction, history, memoir, novels, poems, essays, etc – that they are all a construct of a mix of human memories. He more or less says that Andy Kaufman was right — that everything blurs. He cites a variety of examples of the trend, including some Eggers’ work and some of Frey’s. (In his view, Stephen Frey should have gone back on Oprah, not to take his beating by self-important critics, but rather to help people understand this idea):

“When Frey, LeRoy, Defonseca, Seltzer, Rosenblat, Wilkomirski, et al. wrote their books, of course they made things up. Who doesn’t? Each one said sure, call it a novel, call it a memoir; who’s going to care? I don’t want to defend Frey per se—he’s a terrible writer—but the very nearly pornographic obsession with his and similar cases reveals the degree of nervousness on the topic. The whole huge loud roar, as it returns again and again, has to do with the culture being embarrassed at how much it wants the frame of reality and, within that frame, great drama.

…

I’m disappointed not that Frey is a liar but that he isn’t a better one. He should have said, Everyone who writes about himself is a liar. I created a person meaner, funnier, more filled with life than I could ever be. He could have talked about the parallel between a writer’s persona and the public persona that Oprah presents to the world. Instead, he showed up for his whipping.”

He doesn’t really argue that novels will actually disappear — more that they are occupying a less and less central place in our culture.

I highlighted more passages in this book than I have in a really long time, even though I don’t really like the premise — but I know that Shields is correct about single-author long form work receding in importance, and very quickly.

Anyway, I think this is a really important piece of work for anyone who’s interested in where writing is headed at the moment. It’s a little sad to me, but really probably isn’t good or bad, just a reflection of today’s fragmented, multi-media, always synthetic culture.

One of my favorite set of passages:

I have a weakness for Steve Almond’s non-fiction work. I loved Candy Freak, a fantastic book in which Almond writes about a huge variety of candy-related histories.

In his latest book, he talks about his life as a rock critic, and more importantly, as a Drooling Fanatic. He talks about all sorts of music that he’s loved, bands that he’s hung out with. He talks about how powerful music is — says when he hears “Sunday Bloody Sunday” he’s about ready to join the IRA; how listening to “Sweet Home Alabama” makes him want to drink beer and shoot things, along with some less charitable emotions.

Skewers lots of really awful music, like this:

“I said before that there is no objectively “bad” music. I must now amend that statement. In so doing, let me cite Duke Ellington, who once famously declared that “there are only two kinds of music: good music and bad music. And by bad music I mean specifically the song ‘(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa’ by Toto.” Ellington died two years before Toto formed as a band, which speaks to his prescience.”

and later in that chapter:

“What makes “(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa” so bad? Mostly, it’s the lyrics. Also, the instrumentation, the vocals, and that virulent jazz-lite melody, which, despite the manifest wretchedness of everything I’ve just mentioned, means that you are no doubt conjuring the song even as you read this—those hypnotic banks of synthesizer and phony “tribal”-sounding drums—and without at all meaning to, sort of … grooving to “(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa,” sort of digging it, sort of bathing in the buttery memory of sixth grade or tenth grade and hand jobs and lip gloss and really actually kind of remembering, or rediscovering, how much you love “(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa” even as you’re hating yourself for this love. It’s complicated.”

That’s comedy gold right there. Leads right up to him talking about his early dating life, where he really, really liked a woman until they went to her house and she was so excited to put on Air Supply’s Greatest Hits, whereupon he immediately wanted to stop seeing her. But then considered that that make him shallow. And then decided to break up anyway.

Great book. Highly recommended.

This book reminded me a LOT of Stephen King’s The Stand. Some sort of vampire-creating virus gets loose, destroying the earth, people head to Las Vegas, that type of thing.

And coming in at nearly 800 pages, the length is a lot like The Stand, too.

But even with that, and maybe it’s the oxycodone talking, but I really enjoyed it. The time scope is actually longer than King’s work, and the writing is more character-driven and interesting.

Fun book for summer reading.

Billed as a book of modern fairy tales, I found this book pretty middling. The writing style did feel a lot like fairy tales, and the stories themselves were really quirky, but I just didn’t enjoy them very much at all.

Sort of a post-Iraq War spy thriller set in Beijing and other Chinese cities, with a little dose of World of Warcraft thrown in the mix. I liked it pretty well, and it was well written, but there probably wasn’t really enough plot to keep me totally interested. Given my visits to China over the past few years, and SPL’s Mandarin, I’m more interested than most folks in the context.

Liked it well enough; probably wouldn’t recommend it to most. Great book cover, though.

I seem to be on a bit of a modern fantasy streak, reading a lot of books about gods that crash on your couch and ruin your transmission, that sort of thing. Maybe because it’s summer. Not sure why.

Anyway, this is another in that set of books, and I probably liked it the least (compared to Sandman Slim and Johannes Cabal, the Necromancer). Nevertheless, it was a quick and fun read, and I’ll probably read more by Martinez in the future. Good but not fantastic, I thought.

In other words, they’re different devices, and one is not the superset of the other.

I’ve gone through a few stages in coming to this conclusion — pre-iPad I was convinced the iPad wouldn’t be any good for reading at all. I was wrong. The first few weeks I had my iPad, I didn’t turn on my Kindle a single time. But the last couple of weeks I’ve been balancing out usage, and finding that I’m much happier.

The iPad is, for sure, a better experience for magazines, newspapers, and (obviously) web content. (Not to mention video and interactive stuff, which the current Kindle can’t even attempt.) It’s quite an acceptable reading experience for books, too, especially if you’re reading just a few pages at a time.

But whenever I tried to read for a longer time, I found a few problems. It’s pretty heavy to hold in one hand. The touch UI means the screen is always smudgy and needs attention (that same attention I’m trying to pay to the actual content). It’s not very comfortable to hold laying down in bed. And I found that the backlit screen tended to get me worked up as I was trying to drift off to sleep — sort of defeating the whole purpose.

There’s also an unusual psychological effect that happens. My brain tends to think of my iPad first in terms of communication — checking mail, following Twitter, whatever. And so even when I’m trying to focus on a book, I find myself hopping out of the book for just a few seconds to check up on things. With Kindle, my brain seems to understand that I’m in long-form-reading mode, and stays more still.

As I’ve read full books on both devices over the past few weeks, what I’ve found empirically is that I can read faster, and for longer, and with better understanding and recall when I’m using my Kindle than when I’m reading on my iPad. I can’t prove that to you for a certainty, but it’s very obvious in my recent reading — there’s just no comparison. So for me, the iPad can’t supersede the Kindle. They’re different devices for different purposes.

When I use the iPad, in a lot of ways, I feel like I’m living in the future. It’s an amazing device — beautiful, fun to throw data around, etc. And ultimately is an incredibly interesting split between form and function. (The form has essentially nothing that indicates what the function is — it’s perfectly plastic.)

And looking at the Kindle, it feels a lot like I’m looking at the past. It’s kind of a homely looking device. Has too many buttons in weird shapes. It’s black and white. Strange to say that about an invention that didn’t even really exist 3 years ago.

But I think it’s that in-the-past-ness of the Kindle that’s also its great strength. I find my mind more still, more focused. I find myself able to pay utmost attention to the content, and to really live in the words and ideas. In an age where I’m super-twitchy to read my tweets and mails all the time, the focusing effects of Kindle vs iPad feels like a real throwback win.

It’s pretty clear to me at this point that we’ve moving into a world where we’ll all have multiple screens around us — things we used to call “televisions,” or “phones,” or “eBooks,” or “computers.” And some of those screens will be have their own light and computing power like iPad; others will have reflective displays and mostly show content that comes from the cloud, like Kindle. I think as consumers, we’ll increasingly want all our content on whatever screen happens to fit our current circumstance. What’s around, what’s easy to hold, maybe what’s easy to share with others. It’s very clear that we’ll have screens everywhere, and content connected to all of them.

Anyway, like I said at the top: I think that for most folks who only read a little bit, the value proposition of the iPad and everything it can do will be superior.

But for a guy who for his whole life has never gone anywhere without a book in his hand, the iPad just doesn’t serve me as well as the Kindle for reading books right now. That might change; I might adjust. We’ll see. But for now, for me, my Kindle is the place for books.

This is a very unusual novel — I picked it up because of an incredibly glowing review in The New York Times, even though the subject matter didn’t seem that interesting to me.

It’s the story of a small international paper that’s based in Rome. Each chapter follows a different person who’s involved in the paper somehow, and there are interstitials that tell the story of the paper through the decades.

Doesn’t sound like much, does it?

And yet it was a very enjoyable read to me — the characters were all interesting and varied; the paper was weird and undistinguished enough to make you wonder at motivations of everyone; and the prose and dialog was really tight and thoughtful.

Definitely recommended, even if it’s a bit outside of your normal read.

I really liked the main topic of this book: motivation. In particular, Pink looked at why people do the work they do, what helps them to achieve. Firefox & Mozilla was a primary example, which was gratifying.

I didn’t find the book quite as deep or useful as I was hoping, though — ultimately was pretty short and a bit of a disappointment to me.

This is another quick read that I picked up at Al Billings’ suggestion while I was home sick last week. Another story about a guy who interacts with Hell and then runs around doing zany stuff on earth. Very hard edged, very violent. Pretty good mythology, lots of action.

I liked it; will read more by Kadrey in the future. But combined with Johannes Cabal, I think I’ve had my fill of deal-with-the-devil books for a few months.