Distractions are really paper tigers. They have no power of their own. They need to be fed constantly, or else they die. If you refuse to feed them by your own fear, anger, and greed, they fade.
Mindfulness in Plain English (Venerable H. Gunaratana Mahathera)
I started reading this book on December 29 and finished it yesterday, February 7. That’s according to the ReadMore app, an app I’ve been using to track my reading. It took me 11.5 hours over 41 days and 16 reading sessions, with an average reading time of 44 minutes per session. The app does all this computation for you. What I’m learning about all this self-tracking is that I’m way slow with my reading. More than I liked to. On Goodreads I challenged myself to read 25 books this year but at that rate I’ll get around 10 books. But having this data lets me see what I need to do.
Lets get to the book.
Reading in the Brain is by the author and cognitive psychologist Stanislas Dehaene. I read his previous book, The Number Sense, and like that book, this one is a bit heavy on brain research and brain mapping. But once you get past the heavy region name dropping like the occipito lobe and the temporal lobe, you’ll see that this is a wonderful book about the amazing ability we humans are lucky to have: reading.
One the main thesis of the book is that it’s a “miracle” we can read. Dehaene postulates his theory of neuronal recycling of how the brain region we use today for reading was probably used for something different. In the short period of 2000 years or so since the invention of reading and writing, our brains have recycled and fine tuned neurons to recognize symbols as signifying speech sounds and meaning.
Dehaene takes you on a journey on how it all works. From how the eyes see words to were they go in your brain to be processed. He gives a brief history of writing. A big part of the book deals with dyslexia and “mirroring” errors when reading. This is important to understand reading in the brain because it reveals a great deal on what’s happening, particularly before we become fluent readers. One of Dehaene theories is that if it wasn’t for the brains’ plasticity, we would all be mild dyslexics and make mirror errors (confusing b with d) more frequently.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves reading and to parents and teachers.
I’m currently reading the book Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene. I’m about one third through it. The book’s second chapter is devoted to a brain area that the author and other researchers call the Letterbox, or the left occipito temporal region if you want to get more technical. Most of the objects that appear on our visual field go to another area of the brain that does a good job of recognizing the stuff around us. But words and letters go to the Letterbox. This area knows that these are not just some squiggly lines and dots on a white page. It knows that they have a sound, and that that sound carries a meaning. Suffice to say that the book is very interesting and shows how amazing it is that we humans can read.
But the reason I’m bringing up this Letterbox concept is the importance of reading, specially for people that want to write everyday or every week. Reading is like food for a writer and just like food, you have to be careful with what you eat. You shouldn’t eat too much junk food and you should have a balanced diet. I’m giving this advice as much to myself as to anyone reading out there. I surely could read more fiction. I’m a non-fiction junkie.
Reading everyday also helps with the concern most people are having about writing every day. (Check out the comments in this Mashable post that talks about the Post a Day/Week WordPress project) On a day to day basis our lives are pretty banal and trivial. Even celebrities have “talking about the weather” days. It’s true. Everything is not inherently interesting in life, but we can make anything interesting if we try. The different voices, stories, emotions, colors, perspectives, characters, genres, worlds, and even smells that you get from reading are surely going to stimulate your Letterbox.
Before Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer became an actual book, the tools were a series of blog posts Roy Peter Clark wrote over at Poynter.org. The version I’ve read were those original 50 blog posts collected in PDF form. You can find all the original collected posts here and if you want to you can download the PDF from my Dropbox folder here.
From what you can see on the actual book’s table of contents there are some differences from the the names of the tools and how it’s divided by parts, but it’s still the same basic 50 tips. It takes you from the basics of grammar, to the more advance story telling techniques like “saving string” and “foreshadowing”. It’s a writing exercise book. Every tool ends with a “Workbench” section which are a series of suggestions to practice what you just learned.
I highly recommend it if you want to improve your writing. Here’s a great review from Snarkmarket if you still need more convincing.
The reason I’ve read this book is because I’m planning on taking the exams for the ACMT(Apple Certified Macintosh Technician) certification. This book and other Apple Training Series books are the only books out there authorized by Apple as training material for the exams. This one in particular is to prepare you for the 9L0-008 exam, which is one of the two exams you have to take to get the ACMT certification.
I knew beforehand that this book was going to be dated. It’s last revision was done in 2007. So that was something that I expected and willing to deal with. But I wasn’t expecting it to point to so many extra reference material. It sends you to read Apple Knowledge Base articles, there are extra chapters to download, and 5 service manuals you’ll be using throughout the book. At times it felt like the book is extra reference material for each of the Mac models’ service manuals.
The first 8 chapters, or lessons, deal with stuff like using the resources Apple provides, safety precautions, tools to use, and some general networking theory. The rest of the book deals with 5 of the Mac family computers: The iMac, the Mac Mini, and the Mac Pro on Desktops, and the MacBook and Macbook Pro on Portables. There are no MacBook Airs. Each of the models follow a four lesson format. The first lesson is a quick and short intro, an upgrading lesson, a taking apart lesson(in these lesson you might as well read the service manuals) and a troubleshooting lesson. The troubleshooting lessons are a series of symptoms and the steps to take to fix the problem.
It still remains to be seen if the book will do it’s job. I’m hoping on taking the 9L0-008 exam before the year ends. There’s still some extra material I have to read. There are lessons on iBooks and PowerBooks still waiting to be read. All this extra material is available to download when you register the book at Peachpit. The problem is that this extra material which include the service manuals you’re going to need, are for late 2006 Macs. The importance of the service manuals is that they have the detailed taking apart instructions for each of the models, and these service manuals are only available to authorized Apple service providers, AASP’s.
So if you already have a background repairing PC’s, this will be a piece a cake. For someone starting out I would first recommend to take the Applecare Training. The second option would be to wait for a new revision of the book, which it must be coming out soon. I mean Mac OS X Support Essentials v10.6, which is for the second exam, is current. For the rest of the people who just likes to dabble with computers it’s still a great reference to have and there’s always iFixit.
Cognitive Surplus is written by the author Clay Shirky. He is also a teacher at New York University, where he teaches “New Media” at the Interactive Telecommunications Program. His previous book is called Here Comes Everybody where he tackled the subject of the power of the web for groups to organize. Shirky has also written for publications like The New York Times and Wired.
My first exposure to Clay Shirky was a talk he gave about the so called problem of information overload. In the talk he explained that the problem is not really information overload. We have had an over abundance of information for centuries. The problem, he said, is a filtering issue. He explains that since the cost of publishing on the web is zero, there’s no loss if you don’t filter for quality. In traditional publishing the costs are high thus the need to filter for quality before taking that risk. In this book he writes about this subject when he gets to the history of the printing press.
My first impulse to read this book was because I wanted to hear the good news first. What I mean by that is that it was either Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows or this one. For the last couple of months, there’s been this debate going on on how the web is doing x to us. Mostly negative. How it’s robbing our attention, our ability to concentrate, etc. Now that I read Cognitive Surplus, I wouldn’t say the it has an opposing view to The Shallows. Carr’s is about psychology and the web and Shirky’s is about sociology and the web. But one is definitely viewing the glass half empty, and the other is viewing the the glass half full. While Clay Shirky is definitely a techno optimist, don’t confuse him with a social media 2.0 guru enthusiast.
If I could sum up the book with one idea it would be this: “The stupidest possible creative act, is still a creative act.” This quote comes from the first chapter of the book we’re he discusses LOLCATS. Here Shirky is acknowledging that sure, there’s a lot of crap on the web, but it’s better than having nothing. And it’s not just about a content creator making something for an audience, but about creating something to share with a community. For that purpose, the quality is secondary.
The key idea in the book though is free time and television. Television is so embedded in our culture that we don’t realize how much time we actually spend on it. Shirky started looking at this because of the frequently asked question, “Were do people find the time.” The time has always been there since industrialization and the 40 hour work week. It’s that for the last 50 plus years or so, we have spent that free time passively staring at a light emitting box. The so called boob tube. Shirky’s conclusion is that the people who have opted to watch less television have made Wikipedia possible, as well as LOLCATS.
Through out the book Shirky also answers why we’re doing this for free and what motivates people to do it. The short answer: because we can. The opportunity is there. People just don’t want to be a passive consumer anymore. They also want to create and more importantly, to share with people. Now we can. He also writes about the impact and the potential that social media can have with civic service.
This is a big deal. It’s an interesting time to be in. We still watch a lot of television, but while we’re watching it, we look up info on IMDB from our smart phones. We listen to music, but look for what people are saying and we rate them. We are no longer just an audience, we are the people formerly known as the audience.
The first time I read about this novel was through the Words and Coffee blog. The idea of a detective noir story set in a fantasy world were fungi pretty much control the population caught my attention fast. The cover of the book alone, as Jonathan Danz observed, is so weird and cool that it’s hard not to be curious about it. And I gotta tell you, that curiosity was satisfied.
The plot is classic detective noir. Finch is a detective investigating a double homicide. He works for the “gray caps”, the mysterious creatures that have taken control of the city of Ambergris. While investigating, Finch discovers that there’s more to it than a simple double homicide and that’s when the fun begins.
The Finch character is like an edgier Deckard from Blade Runner. Blade Runner by the way is a great reference point. If you loved that film, you will definitely love this novel. While technically not a dystopia -it’s not a far off future- it has that grim, decaying, retrofitted future Los Angeles feel to it. The difference is that guns here have fungal bullets. There’s a whole lot of fungi through out the novel. Spores, tendrils, fruiting bodies, and other weirdness.
Now that I know that this novel is part of a series called the Ambergris cycle, I can’t wait to read the previous books which are City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword.
Fungal Noir, Steampunk, Sci-fi, Fantasy, this novel defies categorization and that’s a good thing. If you want to read something unique and amazing you wont be disappointed. I can’t recommend it enough.
After 6 long months I’m finally done with this book. I started back in January when some of the people who participated on Infinite Summer started the group read. People like Matt Bucher over at Bolanobolano.com and the Infinite Zombies guys. Like Infinite Jest, the reason I got interested in reading it was because I wanted to sink my teeth into something more literary. But I soon found out that this was just a bit too literary for me and completely out of my league.
The length of course is one the biggest reasons why it’s daunting. But its anticlimactic and detached narrative compounds that difficulty. I really couldn’t enjoy this book. While there are some passages and interesting stories within, fantastic and surreal stories, they never lead you anywhere. Every character speaks in the same detached tone, making every character sound the same. Even the Archimboldi character, which is the mysterious German author the novel leads up to in the first part, sounds the same.
There’s a review I saw on Amazon that says this book is for writers and academics. Those are probably the only ones who can “get” this book and spot the self references and literary allusions. They can say this is a masterpiece, but for me this was just a rambling writerly writer novel.
Couldn’t resist this one today while browsing Borders.
Un oasis de horror en medio de un desierto de aburrimiento. – Charles Baudelaire
It’s very rare for me to not finish a book, but this one could be one of those rare ones. It was psyched at first when the group read started at Bolanobolano.com, but it’s been a huge drag. I’m at page 565, about half of the book, in The Part About the Crimes and it’s truly an oasis of horror in the middle of the desert. What has kept me at it is the supposed Lynchian influence. But “Lynchian” is something more tied to the visual form and can’t be transferred well to narrative form. But I’m still giving it a chance.
