I've read a lot of fiction this year and I've had a hard time getting to processing ym book notes. As my kids get older, time gets used up taking them to events and that means something must be put aside. Lately, that's been the final note processing.
The Diary of a Bookseller
I finished this book last night, and while I enjoyed it I realized that owning a bookstore is merely a fantasy. I don't want to deal with Amazon or AbeBooks or customers that insist a book must be discounted.
I love the idea of being surrounded by books and reading. I love the idea of reading widely, but the customers seem to ruin the whole endeavour as does the money.
Otherwise, this is an enjoyable look at 2014 from the diary of the bookshop owner. It covers everything from the leaking window to the state of the book industry.
Purchase The Diary of a Book Seller
Think Again by Adam Grant
One of the hard things we must do as we age is to learn to let go of opinions that ar no longer serving us. I've spent much time trying to be a better white dude because I can't help how I was raised, but I can do better.
Think Again is all about learning to have the mental flexibility to rethink the positions you hold. I also found it a great read if you regularly interact with those that hold polar opposite opinions and can never change their minds. Grant gives readers a good pathway to at least opening up a conversation that may lead to deeper mindset change.
How to Write a Lot
I started this book on Kindle and then purchased a softcover copy of it, and gave a copy of it to one of the teachers at my kid's school.
In short, just sit down and write. Stop making excuses. Carpenters don't get "carpentry" block. Writer's block is mostly an excuse for not doing work because it's hard.
The Shock Doctrine
This book takes a hard look at how the US government has used different disasters to remake the world into a capitalist money-making utopia. How they used Hurricane Katrina to roll back services in New Orleans which reduced the quality of education for non-white residents and reduced the civil rights of the people.
It covers wars being used to exploit the resources of other countries to using those same wars to enrich private war contractors at the expense of the locals that were supposed to benefit from the infrastructure investments. Of course, we should ship concrete from the United States instead of having it made down the road at a local Afghan plant. It's much better for the people to have American concrete than jobs.
Oh, and cost-plus contracts are the grease for these insane deals that let companies exploit war for profit.
I'm not sure you can come out of this and see capitalism as anything but a grift for those that already had money to make more money on the backs of exploitation.
Writing to Learn
The central point of this book is that we write to figure out what we think about a topic. I know this applies to me, and I know that I come back to topics over and over as I add new points of understanding to what I think.
We start writing by imitating those that are writing in the area we are interested in, but how many of us move past that? Do we simply do the easy work of writing easy stuff, or do we do the hard work of trying to write stuff beyond us so that we can improve and become experts.
It also made me more sensitive to all the "smart" words that writers use. I recently read The Twittering Machine, but it was so full of $50 words to make the author sound smart that the entire point was obscured behind these fancy words. These fancy words make the writer, and the rare reader that knows the word, feel important and smart.
Avoid them in your writing.