Books I’ve Read, 2011

Previously:

Kicking this year off with a selection from The Big Book of Dick(TM), a birthday present from a friend with an equally tawdry/literary sensibility. I’ve never never actually read any Philip K. Dick before, so looking forward to it. As before, this post will be updated throughout the year with brief impressions of the books and a slightly less than arbitrary star rating.

6th Jan – 24th Jan. The Man In The High Castle, Philip K. Dick. Took a while for me to get into it; more me than the book, I think, but once done, its takeover of my imagination was total. The completeness of its world is amazing: unlike a lot of “what if” fiction, it’s air tight. There’s no leaking in of our world – the characters are completely part of the nightmare. The scene in the hotel – jagged, missing half the obvious words, but packing in such extremes of feeling – held me completely.

25th Jan – 2nd Feb. Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. The story of an incredible achievement, a American mountaineer single-handedly creating an NGO dedicated to building schools for girls in remote areas in Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. His approach – hands-on, building trust with locals – yields terrific results, and so as a book, despite being overlong and the writing lacking a certain something, it’s moving, heart-warming and important. Worth looking at the website for more, particularly this interview with Mortenson [PDF].

3rd Feb – 14th Feb. Cadence & Slang, Nick Disabato. A beautifully produced book about interaction design, interfaces and the feel of digital products. As a newcomer to the field, I found it incredibly useful. It’s full of practical advice, delivered in a straightforward manner. This does mean it’s not the most fun book to read – it’s didactic, split out into very short sections and gets straight to the point. In some ways, I think it would have benefited from a little more poetry to both the writing and its approach; on the other hand, I can see that this may well have ruined it, diluting the advice – which is applicable to a wide range of people and situations – and making it too idiosyncratic.

15th Feb – 21st Feb. A Grief Observed, CS Lewis. I read Joan Didion’s Year Of Magical Thinking last year and couldn’t get into it; similarly with Lewis’ meditation on loss. It’s written in a way that’s plain and elegant, and which clearly narrates the author’s attempts to come to terms with his bereavement. But again, it just wasn’t what I was looking for.

21st Feb – 26th Feb. In A Strange Room, Damon Galgut. A terrific book; three stories, sharing a similar theme — travel — written in a way that’s spare and beautiful. Sounds very literary, but what makes it emotionally successful is it’s just so empathetic in a straightforward, direct way. Only connect; this one does.

27th Feb – 3rd March. Smart & Gets Things Done, Joel Spolsky. Short, sharp and full of good advice about hiring developers.

4th March – 30th March. The Lost Books Of The Odyssey, Zachary Mason. Retellings of the Odyssey – alternate endings, different takes – some of which are just fragments. Fascinating, inspiring that it got into print, and parts of it are just deliciously clever – the chess story in particularly – that you can’t help smiling in pure delight.

31st March – 13th April. A Distant Neighborhood, vols 1 & 2, Jiro Taniguchi. Japanese Manga about a 48 year old salaryman who is thrown back in time to his 14 year old self, months before his father mysteriously disappears. I love time travel stories, and while this was melodramatic in places, its mostly simple, effective and affecting.

14th April – 1st May. Designing for the iPad, Chris Stevens. Written by the designer of Alice for the iPad, there are some good practical lessons here, although if you’ve done a lot of reading in the field, some of it will be preaching to the converted.

24th – 28th April. Elements of Content Strategy, Erin Kissane. Good overview of the field, but it would have really benefited from more specific examples – particularly as CS is so nascent.

1st May – 4th May. Cobra’s Heart, Ryszard Kapuscinski. Short selection of his writings on Africa; a bit random and lacking in context but then it’s a tiny volume. I’d be interested in reading The Shadow of the Sun, which is the full book they come from.

4th May – 12th May. Just Kids, Patti Smith. Terrific ramble through 70s NYC as Smith and the photographer Robert Mappelthorpe find their way in life and art. Avoids too much name-dropping and it’s a curious blend of the lyrical and the naive which keeps it fresh and intriguing. Throughout, there’s a tremendous and constant faith on both their parts in ‘the work’, which is inspiring.

13th May – 17th May. Some Hope trilogy, Edward St Aubyn. You just have to read this. It sounds so dislikeable and dismissible – posh English people being horrid to each other. Rah rah rah. But it is at the end just devastatingly beautiful and sad in such a rich, full emotional way. It’s funny and vertiginously daring, thrilling stomach churning about the heroin and addiction and beautifully patterned – these ripples, patterns repetitions – phrases, situations – echo down through the characters. Stunningly good.

18th May – 8th June. In The Plex, Steven Levy. Better than his iPod book which I read previously, this offers a terrific insight into Google. The interviews and direct quotes are its strong points; the context, less so, as it’s hopelessly one-sided.

9th June – 18th June. Mother’s Milk, Edward St Aubyn. The problem of high standards – it’s basically not as good as the Trilogy, and while it’s full of fine writing, that fall from grace rankles. There’s not enough Patrick, it’s too psychological and Freudian – and Eleanor is too passive, plus there’s too little continuation of the older characters. Iraq war stuff feels awkward. It only really takes flight when Patrick is allowed to riff on Seamus.

19th June – 9th July. The Good German, Jospeh Kanon. Enjoyable, pacy thriller set in Berlin, 1945. The setting is the strongest point as the desperate city is really brought to life. At its best it’s like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy. More action packed and flabbier though, it could do with honing in areas.

10th – 13th July. Miracles of Life, JG Ballard. Brief and mostly flat; Ballard lacks the interest in nostalgia required for a successful autobiography. There’s no sense of the sadness of time passing and no sense of character. That said, it’s clearly an incredible story, and I left Miracles feeling perhaps I just haven’t found the right Ballard book – I want to like him, because there’s something deeply admirable about him and his approach.

14th July – 6th August. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera. DNF. On a line by line basis, it’s very finely written. I found myself folding the corners of pages over to remember passages, but I found the book itself dragging. I didn’t connect with the main characters and their dilemmas. Each time I closed the book, it was easier and easier not to pick it up again.

7th August – 17th August. How to be a Woman, Caitlin Moran. She’s one of my favourite columnists, and a woman who single handedly makes the Times worth reading. No surprises that her book is possessed of the same blend of wisdom and surreal anarchy that she brings to the columns, and the chapter on abortion is particularly moving. I would have preferred more about her, I think – the most enjoyable parts are more personal than her journalism, and her own stories give it more depth.

18 – 27th August. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood. Curiously, everyone I mentioned this book to had a similar reaction: a sort of eye-rolling ‘yeah, read that in school’ dismissal. It’s a shame to be so closed minded about it, because coming to the book fresh, it didn’t seem dated or overly bombastic. Obviously, authoritarian dystopias all live in the shadow of 1984, but I felt The Handmaid’s Tale made a strong case for itself, and still does, as a book with an independent vision. I really liked the framing device too – the end skips forward several hundred years, and creates some interesting ripples going back through the text.

28th August – 1st September. Alchemy of Stone, Ekaterina Sedia. DNF. It’s rubbish; there’s just no sense of drama to the lifeless proceedings at all.

1st September – 27th September. The Little Book of Economics book, Greg Ip. Lots of American examples, but it’s a pretty good primer for understanding The Economist, which is itself a decent recommendation. 

28th September – 3rd October. The Cello Suites, Eric Siblin. Fascinating book about the the rise to prominence of Bach’s austere, beautiful and mysterious cello suites. Beautifully written, evocative and well told, it’s an ideal intro to the music. 

4th October – 16th October. The Bicycle Book, Bella Bathurst. That rare and wonderful thing; an overview of a topic that’s deeply knowledgable but with a lightness to its curiosity.

17th October – 21st November. 1Q84, Books 1 & 2, Haruki Murakami. In parts you worry it’s deeply terrible but just a page or two later and it’s irredeemably wonderful. Combines the bizarre and the mundane in a compelling and convincing way. Utterly unique and brilliant. The ideas shine through; an alternate place, doppelgängers, love and things not being right. 

21st November – 27th November. 1Q84 Book 3, Haruki Murakami. In parts it really drags; some will argue it doesn’t need to be this long but then it’s a novel, and if it’s a good one, it has its own logic, determines its own needs. This one certainly does; beautiful ending, it might be predicatable but it’s really earned it, and some beautiful writing too. Unique. 

28th November – 11th December. Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson. Disappointing. Of course, it’s full of great stories, but there’s very little analysis, or sense of understanding about the why and the how. 

12th December – 24th December. The Greenhouse, Audur Ava Olafsdottir. Strange, slim, light and yet strong enough to really pull you through its pages.

24th December – 28th December. Zero History, William Gibson DNF. Yikes, this was truly terrible – and yet the writing is so technically beautiful, but with so little to say. The story is meaningless (a marketing agency hunts for someone who designs jeans), the plotting lazy, and the characters empty. Whereas Gibson once created worlds where you never knew where you were, and always felt in challenged and threatened, here you get to watch a few idle rich kids travel the world in search of nothing at all. It’s hard to discern anyone’s motivation, harder still to share it – Gibson himself only seems enagaged when delivering parapgraphs of description or discussion about the conflation of military and casual clothing design. What makes it all the more heartbreaking is that there is brilliance here – the absences of characters taken away by screens, the strange loneliness of cites – but that instead of creating, he, like the marketing firms he writes about, is content to package up a little technical and otaku knowledge and sell it back to the dumb literati who shower him with plaudits. Woeful.

Where you come from, where you go

In the phone's gallery

I went to New York last week, mostly for work, but I had two free days at the end to explore the city. I took, as always, a Lonely Planet guidebook, but most of the time I built a list of places to go from going online. It strikes me now how easy the world has become, and simultaneously, how difficult.

It’s easy to find places in a new city now. I wrote ‘in New York’ on Facebook and people sent me bits and pieces of information. I looked at I suppose what you would call conventional review sites, places like Tripadvisor and Chowhound. I had places bookmarked and saved in a list on Simplenote, restaurants and shops and bars that had been mentioned in RSS feeds the few months previous to the trip. There were some saved bookmarks (Pinboard now Delicious is dying), and I went for a coffee at La Colombe Torrefaction in Soho because Joanne McNeil posted a photo of a beautiful coffee on Instagram just the week before I was due to go, and of course, everything on Instagram is neatly geo-tagged.

It’s hard to work all this out. It’s hard if you’re someone who doesn’t live on the internet; conventional search is just so bad at getting to it. I’ve built this delicate web of connections and conduits over years. Ways of filing information, having it there and ready. Ways of trusting people, too – I’ve never actually met Joanne McNeil, just swapped a few tweets and read her blog for a long time and yet that picture was all I needed to know that La Colombe Torrefaction would be selling one fine cup of coffee. Typing “best places in NYC for x” into Google is weak compared to all this, but it’s all most people have.

And it’s hard to work out if you’re talking about advertising. One of the chimeras on the web is stats: you get some numbers and you think they describe the world perfectly, completely. Entry pages, exit pages. Conversion rates. Numbers leave no room for the messiness and the softness, the permeability of the real world. Advertising played a role in where I went: it was on the sites I visited, and to take the coffee place as an example, the look and feel of its own site was important to me. But accounting for that? When, as a commercial person, you’re doing your reports for the money you spent? That would be hard. So much of the research for that trip wasn’t caught in the numbers – or to give the Google argument maybe it was, it’s just buried very deeply.

A week with the iPad and my family

Normally I spend my time surrounded by people who are completely comfortable with technology. They are – we are – people who work at computers all day long. That’s not a small thing. It changes your perceptions of how you approach problems, how you find information, how you communicate, how you get from A to B and how you shop.

Crucially, I think working with computers teaches you that they’re fun: it’s in those drifty moments at work when someone sends you a video of Dinner Time With The Dog-Man or that you spend time organising drinks for a friend’s birthday or marvelling at The Big Picture that you learn a sense of computers as enjoyable. Modern desk jobs force you to sit and stare at a computer for eight hours a day, so this hardly surprising: any time people are forced to do anything they find a way to have fun, whether it’s doodling in the margins of maths books or inventing games to pass the time at the checkout.

My life is changing, so I recently took a week off and went North to visit various members of my family. I took my bike so I could get out in the countryside, and I took the iPad so I could talk about some of the new things I’m doing at work. The people I visit do lots of different jobs – my Aunt’s a teacher, my cousins are retail managers, mechanics, academics and my Grandfather is rather actively retired. None of these are the 100% desk-and-data jobs my friends and I do, so it was fascinating to see how they got on with the iPad.

Continue reading “A week with the iPad and my family”

Today was the first day of Autumn

The Time It Passed So Easily

Two weeks ago: This is last week of the holidays (passing two schools on my way to work, I’m still attuned to the calendar). The kids will be getting their new uniform, the nylon stiff and the shirt folds still sharp. I am getting my old jumpers out; I feel the cold first in my finger tips as if the season is withdrawing into my body, as if heat comes from the heart. Reminds me of my favourite Greek myth: Persephone and the underworld.

Earlier this week: Cycling home, and as the sun drifts away, St. Paul’s is pink, like the last moons of Tatooine, inside, an orchestra playing, Luke Skywalker’s yearning. On the bike, time feels more present. You ride between the cracks in the hours, down the gap between late afternoon and evening, like a fold in a sheet of paper, a gunnel in which the dusk collects like dust. Feel the heat in the air, or a cold draft coming off the common.

Today, it felt like the first day of Autumn today; grey and blowy.

And the photo? The Swedish coast, a million months ago, well before summer even thought of ending.

Six things I have learned from cycling home

The clunk of the crank and the spin of the wheels with sun in their spokes; the way your legs move like you’re running but your feet never touch the ground. Stopped traffic, the smooth swoop of a fast corner and with it the freedom of the city.

I cycled quite a lot when I was a teenager, but stopped when I came to London – my big, heavy mountain bike was a pain to haul around and it sat mouldering at the top of the stairs before I gave it away. Ten years since my cycling heyday and I decided to get back into it, buying myself a bike through the excellent Ride 2 Work scheme.

Here are some things I’ve learned from cycling to and from work. Obviously, YMMV.

1. Don’t bother with a hybrid. The problem with hybrids is that they seem so logical – particularly if you’ve been away from cycling for a few years. If you had a bike as a teenager, it was probably a big heavy lunk of a thing made by Raleigh, and designed to be knocked around. It probably looked like a mountain bike. Problem is, if you look at mountain bikes now, well, they’re pretty much like motorbikes without the engines. Disk brakes, chunky tyres, suspension front and back, strange shaped frames – exciting stuff, but not really what you want for riding through London.

So the natural next step is a hybrid; they look like the mountain bikes of old, only on a diet. They still have the flat handle bars and a little bulk, but they’re sensible. You can ride them on and off road. It’s the best of both worlds… right?

The problem I found when researching is hybrids are invariably compromised. Some come fitted with slick tyres – so you’re not going to be able to ride off road without changing those. Then there’s the fact they’re not really that light, and don’t always come fitted with larger wheel sizes. Light bikes with big wheels go further and faster with less work from the rider.

And really, are you ever going to ride off road? I wanted a light, fast bike that I was mostly going to spend riding to and from work, or around South East London. So I bought myself a real road bike. It’s brilliant; fast, nimble and something I really look forward to riding.

Continue reading “Six things I have learned from cycling home”

The history of school history

A few years ago, my Mum took early retirement and went back to university to study for an MA (even going so far as to live in halls again…); she liked it so much[1], she went on to study for a PhD. With that under her belt, she’s now working at the Institute of Historical Research at ULU on a project called History in Education, and she needs some volunteers to fill in a survey about their memories of learning history.

Here’s a bit about the project:

“The aim is to create and publicise a historical record of history teaching as it has developed over the past century in English state schools. We’re looking at what history was actually taught and how ‘what history was taught’ changed and why, as well as how the experience and expectations of history teachers and students changed over time…

There has been no previous attempt to consider the development of history teaching across the twentieth century in the context of national and regional policy together with the ‘lived experience’ of those in the classroom. It is intended to publish the results of the Project for a range of audiences, both academic and ‘popular’, via printed and electronic means and also to create resources for use within the classroom.”

She’s looking for people who studied history at state schools in England to fill in the survey. You can grab it at the link below – if you fill it in, please return it to the email address at the bottom of the file. Thanks for your help!

Download the survey.

[1] Learning, that is. After the MA, she moved out of halls and bought a house.

Added to the wishlist: On Roads

[Book] Having moved from the North to the Home counties when I was 11, then to York for University, then Norwich, and then London, I grew up on the M1, M6 and A1. Asylum’s lovely review of On Roads meant it headed straight to the wishlist:

“On Roads deals mainly with the motorway era, beginning with the first stretch of the M1, completed in 1959 and the subject of such excitement that it had four press openings… On the M1′s first weekend, “nearly all its overbridges were crowded with sightseers”, and the transport minister, Ernest Marples, sounded a note of Mr Cholmondeley-Warner when he advised that ‘on this magnificent road the speed which can easily be reached is so great that the senses may be numbed and judgement warped’… Moran is equally appealing on the psychology of driving, the ‘terra nulla of the roadside verge’, and motorway service stations with their ‘rich seam of English ordinariness and gone-to-seed glamour.'”

On Roads, by Joe Moran.

The Japanese food you need to eat: Ramen

A bowl of Ramen

You know what you should eat if you go to Japan? Ramen, especially if you go in the Spring or Autumn (the best seasons to visit Japan, perhaps because they’re well suited to ramen). So what is it? A giant bowl of thick broth with noodles, sliced meat and other goodness. This article from the Guardian is a good introduction to Ramen, linking in particular to Ramen Tokyo, which seems a good place for English speaking seekers of the perfect Ramen restaurant to start. Ramen Tokyo links to Supleks, which is the Ramen database (in food, above all things, the Japanese are obsessives). Yes, it’s all in Japanese, but you can a) Use Google Chrome which will translate for you and b) learn a bit of Japanese. Ramen is worth it.

A couple of my favourite places for Ramen in Tokyo are the Ippudo chain, and Dokutsuya in Kichijoji.