Category: Books and Media I Recommend

I think it is crucial to read outside of one’s vocation.

Winn-Dixie is a supermarket chain where I grew up, in Tallahassee, Florida. Furthermore, Kate DiCamillo is a magical writer, whom my children and I discovered as they were growing up. I recently found audio books at our local library (Libby app, anyone?) and have been listening to a wide range of books on my commute to work.

Not only is the storytelling just brief, and perfect, but the audio narrator is entirely charming and transports me to my secondary school years and the heavy southern accents all around me at the time. The immediacy of the memory is almost as dramatic as those times when a particular aroma (?pecan pie?) ‘clicks’ in your mind’s eye back to a specific time and place…

In contrast to what I heard from day-to-day in town, I preferred to think that MY English was derived, on the other hand, NOT from my parent’s immigrant tongues, nor from my southern-drawling friends, but from Sesame Street, Electric Company and, of course, neutral-midwestern-toned Walter Cronkite:

“And, THAT’S the WAY it is, JAN-u-ary FIF-teen, NINE-teen-SIX-ty-EIGHT.”

Walter Cronkite, CBS evening news

CMIO’s take? Well, give this a listen, or indeed, read ANYTHING by Kate DiCamillo: The Miraculous Story of Edward Tulane, Tiger Rising, any of them. The sweet, optimistic years of childhood, the purity of mystery, the tentativeness of friendship and connection…Young Adult Fiction is where its at. And, Happy holidays, y’all!

This is a fun read. My father never understood my passion for fantasy (The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings) in middle school or sci-fi in high school (Ender’s Game, entire libraries of Asimov, Heinlein, PK Dick, and countless others). I’d try to explain, (not nearly as cogently as this journalist) that science fiction was imagining about our future, and that so many predictions from sci-fi authors have come true.

I’m currently reading Life 3.0 and SuperIntelligence for an upcoming book club, and also stumbled across The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, from 1959! Vonnegut is prescient; he predicts future concerns of machine intelligence, indeed artificial general intelligence, the concept (and worry) that, once created, a superintelligent being will be difficult or impossible to control and may find its human creators tiresome and unnecessary.

Hmm. The same theory is proposed, 60 years later by the authors of Life 3.0 and Superintelligence, but with more evidence and detail.

CMIO’s take? Where is the sci-fi about the future of Electronic Health Records? Ready to write one?

Five stars.

John Green channels teenage angst like no one, and he parlays them, unaccountably, into riveting novels of pathos and the teen journey. He broke my heart with The Fault in Our Stars, and he did it agai with Turtles. The title of course comes from the story that some old woman was arguing in favor of the Flat Earth theory with a modern scientist who was of course discussing that the Earth is a sphere. The woman then patiently explains, when the scientist asks, that the Flat Earth is, of course, sitting on the back of an enormous turtle. Ah ha! thinks the scientist, who asks, “Well, what is the turtle sitting on, then?” And the immortal response: “Well, it’s turtles ALL THE WAY DOWN.” Duh.

Green parlays that saying into the mental health cycle of the protagonist, whose Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) pervades the narrative and prevents our heroine from achieving so many great things. Throw in a murder mystery, and you THERE, you’ve lost another full day of your vacation marinating in someone’s fever dreams.

CMIO’s take? I always feel rewarded, when I come out the other side of a novel, feeling like I just lived someone else’s life for a day or so, my adrenal glands all squeezed out, my emotions having been through the wringer, and somehow, my own head a bit clearer for it, and my own problems just a little bit less pressing.

• 

Here we are (again)! How can I review this? An incredible landmark of a book, it has sat on my bookshelf for more than a decade, and then on my ‘actively reading coffee table’ for another few years. Despite its mention in almost every important other book I have read, and my repeated abortive attempts to push through, I found this book alternatively revelatory and then densely incomprehensible. I frequently dove in, underlined many passages, got stuck, and put this book down for prolonged periods. 

Finally I convinced my book club friends to tackle this, set a discussion date (Jan 2019), and that was my trick to completing the massive read.

What I’ll take away is the idea of linking happiness NOT to acquisition and idle pleasure, but to difficult challenges that are just outside my comfort zone and skill set, where with maximal concentration, I can succeed. 

Fortunately for me, I have had many times in my life when I have achieved such Flow, and now I have a framework for thinking about it and setting up my day, my home, my work life to achieve this as often as possible for myself and for colleagues. 

Incidentally, I have recently completed the massive tome ‘Alexander Hamilton‘ by Chernow, another incredible read (I was drawn in by, of course the immensely popular musical), and I am led to reflect that Hamilton must, in his voluminous lifetime of groundbreaking writings, must have set up conditions to achieve Flow for quite extensive parts of his life, despite tremendous tragedy, political rancor and his final demise at the business end of a duelist’s pistol. For example, he would read all day, head to bed, then wake up the next morning and just write, with no interruptions, for hours. As a result, his subconscious worked on problems overnight. Often his manuscripts had NO corrections, as he would scribble furiously a final draft, fully formed. This was how he tackled many of the Federalist papers, papers that are studies in minute detail by constitutional scholars to this day. 

My favorite Flow pointers:

• Attention is how you create your experience and consciousness, and psychic entropy is the opposite: the chaos that detracts from focus and intentional effort. 
• Flow requires: clear goals and feedback; concentration on the task; a sense of control; loss of self consciousness; transformation of time. 
• Flow occurs when the top of your skills barely match the presented challenge. Otherwise you get boredom or anxiety. 
• Source of dissatisfaction at work: lack of variety and challenge; conflicts with other people/boss; too much pressure, too little time. All CAN BE under our control. 
• Autotelic self: easily translates external threats into enjoyable challenges and maintains inner harmony, transforming potential entropy into creating flow. 

CMIO’s take? I defer to these great words by Chuang Tzu: ‘When I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move my knife with the greatest of subtlety, until–flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”

Four stars.

Stross’s Accelerando is perhaps my favorite book of his so far. I like his writing, the ideas that he sprinkles along the way.

In Singularity Sky, for example, that the economic takeover of a planet begins with a rainfall of portable telephones from the sky, and that those who pick them up are asked to “Entertain us! Tell us a story!” And the surprises continue to develop from there.

He throws in ideas like, nano-machines that can manufacture goods from a ‘storage locker’ of solid metal, on demand as molecules, textiles, objects, working machines are programmed and created upon request. What would that look like at personal scale? within a family? at city scale? nation scale? planetary scale? Is it the result of, or the cause of, revolution?

CMIO’s take: what are you reading? Reading is the ultimate form of empathy, which is the root of compassion, which is the root of communication, which is the root of community and teamwork. We can all read more.

Five stars.

Maybe the best sci-fi book of the year? Well, it is in the running. I’m sure it is difficult for an author to follow-up a first-novel blockbuster book with a successful second novel, but Andy has pulled it off. It is NOT the paradigm-shifting story of a marooned human on Mars, but a gritty, near-future story about a super-smart deliveryman (gal) who is sick of people telling her she’s “not living up to her potential.” And she is a smuggler: she smuggles goods in from Earth to the Moon colony called Artemis. But then her smuggling gets her involved in something a lot bigger than she intended.

Andy unwinds this tale with a huge dollop of delicious hard-science fully integrated into the storytelling and into the problem-solving. This key is the same key that unlocked The Martian for me and so many others. Feels like the 1970’s TV show “The A-team” except with hard science instead of those rapid-action cut scenes where they’re building something cool that will get them out of trouble by the end of the episode. That kind of feeling. Except better.

CMIO’s take? Science rocks. Artemis rocks. Two thumbs up.