non-fiction

This is Water

Book Notes kitt decided around 06:00 on 1 July 2018 to publish this:

Okay, this is one of the shorter books on my "I have read" list that I don't count as a book, per se. I read it in a dead tree format. It contained words on the pages. The whole object had a cover, title page, copyright, and sections. It qualifies as a book in every legitimate definition of the word.

But it's too short for my book reading count.

This is a printing of David Foster Walace's commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. If I had heard it at my college graduation, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have understood it nearly as well as my current day self does. I'm pretty sure if my 21 year old self had understood his words as well as current day self does, my life would have been significantly different.

I'm also pretty sure my 60 year old self will want to smack my current self upside the head, for STILL not understanding these things.

It's a 20 minute read, available in many places online (and in video format, if that's your thing). Worth reading / watching / experiencing.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what the liberal arts mantra of “teaching me how to think” is really supposed to mean: to be just a little less arrogant, to have some “critical awareness” about myself and my certainties… because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
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It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
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Several Short Sentences About Writing

Book Notes Posted by kitt at 16:34 on 30 June 2018

This book was recommended in a slack channel I'm in, along with How to Write Short. The two books together helped her write better copy for a site she was developing. Having recently read Draft No. 4 and How to Write Short, I read this one, too.

The book has two big sections. The first section has a series of short sentences giving writing advice. The second section contains examples of writing, along with a critique of the examples. I enjoyed reading the second section. The first section annoyed me.

A series of short sentences would be fine if each of the lines were actually a complete sentence. Instead, the book is formated with choppy lines that break apart longer sentences.

So, imagine reading a book.

Where each line has a fragment of a sentence.

And you are supposed to know.

That it is actually a single sentence.

One naturally pauses at a period.

Which is not how this book is meant to read.

The pause habit is not breakable.

In a single book.

Yeah, so the first section annoyed me. Despite this annoyance, the advice is good. I was amused at how much of the advice I ignore, especially when it comes to pronouns. I am so bad with my use of pronouns. In particular, I use too many of them.

Anyway, main themes of the book:

1. Use short sentences, you don't need long sentences.

2. Have meaning in each sentence.

3. Trust yourself. Give yourself authority. Write about what interests you.

4. Notice things.

5. Don't use cliches. Question any sentence that appears unconsidered or "naturally."

6. Learn grammar so that you don't annoy the reader with bad grammar that they might not know about but can sense.

The Genius Within

Book Notes kitt decided around 21:33 on 26 June 2018 to publish this:

I spotted this book in a Waterstone in Amsterdam, but couldn't find it locally. Public libraries FTW!

I was expecting in this book a list of here are things you can do to increase your intelligence. In an ideal world, it would include variations based on gender, age, and weight - something like "do this, this, and that and you'll be smarter." Of course, one's expectations should be kept to a minimum, as life has a way of being, regardless of expectations.

The first part of the book is about defining intelligence (which isn't that easy to do, and we haven't done it well), and the history of defining intelligence, in all its ugly forms of repression and genocide that resulted. We humans really do like to create an us versus them about everything.

After defining intelligence, there were the ethics of what to do with intelligence, is it morally okay to increase one's intelligence? Atheletes are banned from performance enhancing drugs, is the mental realm any different when attempting to get an advantage?

The book did have three suggestions for increasing intelligence: modafanil, electric brain stimulation, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (which is a different way of getting the same as the electrical stimulation, just with a different electricity-producing mechanism, what with moving magnetic fields creating electric currents and all).

Experiments with increasing intelligence suffer the same fate as pretty much all cutting edge science: the bad results are ignored, the good results are emphasized, no one knows if things really work, there are no control studies, people are all different enough that we'll always have warnings, and it's all the wild west with the experimenting.

The Sorrows of Love

Book Notes kitt decided around 06:01 on 19 June 2018 to publish this:

I am a fan of The School of Life, their mission, and their products. I've bought a number of their books, and checked a few out from the library.

I was disappointed, however, to realize they publish their books with an aggressive, not-really-enforcable, you-can't-share-this-book license/understanding in the book, which comes shrink-wrapped so you don't know about this license until you've already bought the book. The published license is a "you can't sell, lend, or give away this book without asking us first" policy, which is just strange and off-putting.

That said, their ebook highlight and quote policy is fantastic, 15% instead of the usual 10% that most publishers use.

I am unable to reconcile the disconnect between the two policies.

That said, this book is amazing. I want to give a copy of this book to every person who is marrying. I want to buy a copy for anyone in a relation that could become a long term relationship. I want a copy of this in every eighteen year old's hands. I might feel the same way about The Sorrows of Work if I read it, but I haven't read it yet.

Anyway, this book lists ten aspects of love that one just doesn't consider when one is in an early part of eros / infatuation / hormonal / passionate / physical love. Yet when a relationship matures, it changes and becomes romantic or companionate or fatuous love, it rounds out into less passion and more depth. That change, however, can mean emptiness, loneliness, a misunderstanding about what a relationship should be. We believe the hormones and the fantasy about what long term relationships should be without knowing what a relation really is.

This book does a fantastic job at listing, describing, and explaining the mistakes in the fantasy about what long-term love is, what it looks like, how it feels, what it means.

A Universe From Nothing

Book Notes Instead of being asleep at 11:33 on 17 June 2018, kitt created this:

I really don't know why I picked up this book. There's a non-zero chance it was commended to me from Bob Diller, but it is just as likely to have come from one of the Twitter, Slack, or MB communities I'm in. I have no idea where I picked it up. It did, however, sit on my to-read pile for a good three months. Well, it sat in my Hold pile at the library, which is worse, because those I need to actually read in a timely manner when my loan happens.

Right. I did mention that my book reviews are really stories about how I came upon this book? I swear I did mention this at some point.

Okay, A Universe From Nothing. Here's the gist: in our mathematical understanding of the universe, there's a transition point from one state of matter to another state of matter by which two mathematical constructs appear seemingly out of nothing. These two particles then disappear, and we're left with a nicely solved equation at the end.

No one knows what's going on, where we started, where the universe is going. What we do know is that we're special in some way, this universe is special in that way, and that we are also not particularly special, as the only way we could exist is if the universe was this particular way.

When Breath Becomes Air

Book Notes kitt decided around 22:09 on 7 June 2018 to publish this:

Note to self during reading: Why did I start reading this book? My goodness, this book is powerful.

Okay, first up, this book made me cry. It goes in the rare amazing category of "this book is amazing and/or life-changing, let me buy you a copy" books.

I started this book today, and finished this book today. I wanted something slightly different than the yet-another-astrophysics book I was reading, and picked this one up. And didn't put it down.

And I cried. So much of this book is about the unfairness of life, how the good are cut down too soon, how life takes unexpected turns, how much of life is loss, how we all struggle, and how beautiful a life can be when it has a passion, has meaning.

I don't know. In some ways, it was yet another reminder of how much of my life I have done wrong. That makes it a good book, I'd say, a book that causes self-reflection. As Kalanithi asks, "If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?"

I'm not spoiling anything by saying, hey, he dies in the end. We all die in the end. Not all of us go out gracefully, or so soon. Not all of us live as well or as intensely.

I will be rereading this book. It's amazing, let me buy you a copy.

I spent the next year in classrooms in the English countryside, where I found myself increasingly often arguing that direct experience of life-and-death questions was essential to generating substantial moral opinions about them. Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried them.
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Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.
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Draft No. 4

Book Notes Instead of being asleep at 08:08 on 7 June 2018, kitt created this:

Okay, I really don't know where I found the recommendation for this book, or why exactly I picked it up to read, other than it is a book on writing. Except that this is a book on writing non-fiction, and, well, let's be real, I write fiction.

Unsurprisingly, however, I enjoyed the book. I read it more slowly than I normally read books because much of the advice McPhee gives is embedded in the stories he tells. The format of the book is some varied order of story-lesson-example repeated, with the themes of structure, editors, checkpoints, and the like.

The book is such a great book for writers, not only because McPhee is a fun writer with an intelligent moustache (his joke, read the book to understand), but also because the structure of the book is as instructive as the lessons in it. The book is so much more enjoyable in the story-telling than it would be with only the lessons.

Which is, one would think, one of the points.

The last part of the book talks about the confidence of writers and how words, any words, down for the first draft, are often the hardest part of writing. I do so appreciate this part of the book a lot. Draft No 4 is usually the winner, YMMV.

I appreciated this book a lot, for the stories, for the structure, and for the lessons. I strongly recommend the book for anyone who writes non-fiction, but not necessarily of the technical sort.

Even more so, however, new pieces can shoot up from other pieces, pursuing connections that run through the ground like rhizomes. Set one of these progressions in motion, and it will skein out in surprising ways, finally ending in some unexpected place.
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On Bullshit

Book Notes kitt decided around 11:09 on 6 June 2018 to publish this:

Rob Whiteley recommended this book to me, mentioning that the book is short, yet profound when it comes to determining what bullshit is, and what it is not.

The book is an essay on bullshit. Given the title, this should be obvious. It should have taken me about a half hour to read. I spent much longer reading it, because some parts of it were worth rereading and sitting with, before continuing.

Key points include: bullshit is different than lying, bullshit is closer to bluffing than lying, bullshitting is more acceptable than lying, and, as Rob quoted to me, not all speech is intended to express reality. Intent is also a part of bullshit, as is truth (specifically, not necessarily caring what the truth is at the moment).

The book is, as Rob says, worth a read. Most libraries have it. I recommended heading over to your nearest, sitting down with a cup of coffee, and reading it during lunch.

Also as Rob says:

The idea behind it is subtle but powerful.

It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.
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What is distinctive about the sort of informal discussion among males that constitutes a bull session is, it seems to me, something like this: while the discussion may be intense and significant, it is in a certain respect not “for real.”
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It does seem that bullshitting involves a kind of bluff. It is closer to bluffing, surely, than to telling a lie.
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Ikigai

Book Notes Written with a loving hand by kitt some time around 09:11 on 3 June 2018

I wanted to like this book. I REALLY wanted to like this book.

I didn't like this book.

Not necessarily because it isn't a good book (well, maybe not necessarily), my mom enjoyed it, for example, but because it didn't actually say anything about Ikigai other than its definition.

The idea behide Ikigai is that if you have meaning if your life, you will be able to depending on that meaning through difficult times (resiliency), and have a reason to wake up in the morning. This meaning is part of the reason why people who live long live long.

Except that we don't really know why some people live longer than other people. Something something telomeres, which are barely mentioned in the book, be happy, have a strong community, be less stressful, eat lots of fruit - or was it vegetables, walk a lot, none of the people who live a long life actually KNOW why they live long. Some themes appear, but they don't KNOW.

The book is best described as skimming the surface of many reasons given why some people live longer than others (see above re: meaning, stress, community, exercise, vegetables). It tells us what but doesn't give how, or even offer any suggestion beyond "figure out what you're doing when you're in flow, and do more of that" to find meaning. I'm not against books that skim the surface of many topics, The Antidote and The Happiness Hypothesis are two of my favorite self-help books, and both are similar in their approach of "many ideas under one theme" that Ikigai uses.

Yet they work, and this one didn't. Unsure why.

Reconciliation

Book Notes kitt decided around 15:12 on 29 May 2018 to publish this:

I read this book when I was reading How to Fight. Both books were written by Thich Nhat Hanh. Reading the two books concurrently or immediately sequentially was impactful, many of the lessons reinforced, strengthened.

The reconcilliation of the book's title is about restoring good relationships with the small, often powerless person we were as a child, about accepting the past, and about recognizing the present for what it is and not what we imagine or want it to be.

There are aspects of Buddhism that I struggle with, mostly the ones around ignoring recurring thoughts and anxieties when meditating. This book has some of that, but also instructs us to work with the anxieties originating from childhood trauma (of whatever cause, of whatever intensity, of whatever reason, no matter how small).

This is where the healing can begin: accepting the lack of power we had as a child, reminding ourselves we are now adults, processing the past, and moving forward.

I believe this book is worth reading. Unfortunately, the book won't help if the reader isn't open to the ideas, isn't in a place to heal. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. This book was a teacher for me.

The Buddha said that all of us have the seed of fear, but most of us suppress it and keep it locked in the dark. TO help us identify, embrace, and look deeply at hte seeds of fear, he offered us a practice called the Five Remembrances. They are:

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