Life without a bookstore

Danville, il, my home town, has been without a bookstore for most of the year. First we lost Walden Books when Borders downsized and then we lost a quaint children's book store called Blue Kangaroo. So really the only place to get my book fix has been Walmart. And Walmart doesn't have a huge selection. Plus when I shop for books I want to be surrounded by stacks and stacks of them. I want those stacks to rise above my head. Environment really matters when purusing books.

I was able to stock up on some really good books at Borders going-out-of-business sale a few weeks ago in Champaign. That was awesome! One of the books I now own and have read is called Rot & Ruin. I forget the author's name. I can see the book on my shelf across the room but I'm really sleepy right now and don't feel like getting up. Anyway, it's an awesome book about zombies. I love zombie movies but I had never read a book about zombies. Rot & Ruin is one of those books you beg to turn into a movie!

My mom surprised me at dinner last night with a $40 gift certificate to A Novel Idea, a used book store that opened in the old Walden Books space. So of course after dinner I had to stop by. There was an entire wall of Romance novels, of which I am not a fan. There was a small selection of Sci-Fi and Fantasy and a slightly larger section of general fiction.

Remember I said that the environment of a book store matters? Well A Novel Idea had what looked like the environment of a good bookstore. There were tables and chairs for reading, and stacks of books, they even had some snacks for sale. But there'd was something off. The smell of burning incense reminded me of a metaphysical shop I visited while living in Chicago and there were just way too many Romance novels. Plus in the front of the store they have art for sale. It would have been one thing if it was original art but it looked like they just got them from a bunch of rummage sales.

I only spent $20 of my $40 gift certificate but I'm upset because I don't think I will find any more books there to spend the rest on.

Couldn't Help Myself

I broke down yesterday and bought 2 books. Office Max had a bin of books for $1 each! How could I pass that up?

You're right, I couldn't.

I got 2 books by Kate Jacobs, author of Friday Night Knitting Club; Knit Two and Comfort Food. I read Friday Night Knitting Club a few years ago. It's one of those books that isn't extremely exciting or thought provoking but reading it was like eating grandma's pie, still warm from the oven or waking up to a rainy day (my favorite).

Pealing off the Bargain Bin price label, I'm dreaming about curling up with these books on my hammock out back in October while leaves fall around me and Halloween is in the air.

Man, what lovely things books are.

Book Review: The 4 Hour Workweek

"Life doesn't have to be so damn hard."

-- Timothy Ferriss, The 4 Hour Workweek

The 4 Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss wasn't on my list of Unread Books but I'm so behind on reading for pleasure right now that I thought I would review a book I've already read, already...hmmm

Anyway, I've read a lot of reviews on The 4 Hour Workweek ranging from gushing, foot-kissing fealty to one-liners, sprinkled with 4 Letter Words. Actually most of the reviews fell into these two extremes. Apparently we either love or hate Tim Ferriss.

I think the reason why so many readers can't stand Tim is because he comes off as a pompous prick who's just cheating the system for his own gain. And superficially you might be right. But I think you miss the big-picture point if you take this narrow view of his book and life.

Early in the book Tim tells the story of how he won the gold medal at the Chinese Kickboxing National Championships. He didn't win because he had been training since puberty. He didn't win because he's really big and strong. He actually only had 4 weeks to prepare and if you look at him



you can tell that most men could beat him in a fair fight. Too bad Tim doesn't fight fair.

Tim won the gold because he studied the rules and found loopholes. By dehydrating prior to weigh-in and then hyper-hydrating after weigh-in Tim was able to get into a weight class 3 levels below where he should have been. He also focused on pushing his opponents off the mat three times which resulted in a TKO, technical knock-out.

Tim admits that the judges weren't too pleased with his shenanigans (and I'd imagine the other fighters weren't happy either.) Even I have a hard time condoning his actions. It goes against what we all have been taught about "rules" and "playing the game". If there were no rules we would be living in chaos, right?

The bigger lesson to learn from Tim's gold-winning high jinks is that, in life, we all live by rules and these rules stifle our growth. Whether we realize it or not rules govern every fiber of our existence. Rules come from many sources but most of the rules come from ourselves. We are our own biggest overlords.

Tim took rule breaking to the next level. And most of you probably agree that Tim is a little sleazy. Some of you are probably crying, "Unfair! The rest of us have to follow certain rules. He should too." The point that Tim is trying to make is that you also have the power to break the rules. You just have to get out of your comfort zone.

Tim's Toolbox

Comfort Challenges
Even though The 4 Hour Workweek fall on "just this side" of self help, Tim actually gives practical tools and skill-building exercises you don't find in many self help books. His Comfort Challenges don't just make you feel better about yourself, they are real and tangible tools to help you out of your comfort shell and really start making some changes in your career and life.

Productivity & Breaking the 9 to 5 Rule
The most helpful thing I learned from Tim is to recognize when I'm just filling my work time with unimportant tasks. Most of us have jobs that force us to be at a desk from 9 to 5. And even if you own your own business your customers force you to be by the phone or at the front desk from 9 to 5.

I think most of us would also agree that most of that time is filled with busy work or made-up work. It's a fact that the more time you have to work on something the more tasks you do to fill up that time. The pisser is that many of us aren't rewarded for getting things done faster. We would be fired if we twiddled our thumbs or played Angry Bird during "work time", even if we had an extremely productive 2 hours before that.

To combat this illogical work ethic, Tim suggests giving yourself impossibly short deadlines and only working on 2 "mission critical" tasks per day. Impossibly short deadlines force you to focus on the most important tasks needed to accomplish your assignment. And lets face it, if we are being honest with ourselves we would admit that only 2 important things get done between the hours of 9 to 5 anyway.

Dreamlining
Another tool in Tim's Toolbox that pulls everything together is his Dreamlining Worksheet. Dreamlining sounds uber-self helpy to me but what Tim is really trying to get you to do is take real action toward your goals every day instead of just doing what you always do and hope that something good happens.

What I like most about Dreamlining is that it focuses on real action. You write down 5 things you want to have, to be and to do 6 months from now. (Tim has you turn your Being items into Doing items to stick with the focused action.) This is where so many self help gurus get it wrong. They try to get you to feel differently about yourself or life. Tim tries to help you actually do something about your life. After you have your 15 Dreamlines written down you pick the 4 critical ones and list a step you will take now, a step you will take tomorrow and a step you will take the next day. The goal of Dreamlining is to start working toward your goals today instead of putting them off or creating excuses.

* * *

I've actually read The 4 Hour Workweek 2 and a half times and it took me until the last half time to understand the stripped-down-naked point of the 300 page book. This doesn't make it a bad book though. On the contrary, it makes it a complex (albeit long-winded) instruction manual on how to get the things done that mean the most to you.

The 4 Hour Workweek is basically a blueprint for a more productive life wrapped in Self Help Goop and tied with a Sensational Bow. Which is really sad. I'm sure Tim wouldn't have sold as many books if he wrapped it in anything else but the packaging clouds some pretty awesome insights into the way we work and the things we value. We could all use Tim's philosophy to some degree to help us enjoy our lives more.

I encourage you to read The 4 Hour Workweek if you haven't yet and reread it if it left a slimy coating on your tongue the first time. Ignore the sensational surroundings and think of it instead like a toolbox. Take the tools you need and leave the rest. But use those tools as if your life depended on them which it kind of does.

Envying the Heroes

I'm reading Eldest, the second book in the Eragon trilogy. It's like most other adventure books in the style of Lord of the Rings. A group of mismatched heros from different races team up for a certain middle-earth, magical mission. In Eldest, the mission is to defeat an evil ruler named Galbatorix.

Reading this reminds me of a video I watched yesterday about turning your everyday tasks into games. Most of our time is spent doing boring and seemingly meaningless tasks. Tasks that don't have a clear goal or objective, tasks that don't specify the resources needed in order to complete them and tasks that don't challenge the skills you already posses. Aaron Dignan, the guy in the above video and who has been studying the plague of boredom in our society suggest that we should view employ game mechanics in our lives.

In every game (well, at least the well designed ones) you know what the objective is, you are given obstacles along the way that help you learn new skills needed to continue, you are given instant feedback (if you kill 3 enemies in a row you get extra points and if you fall off a cliff you die) and you know when the game is over because it says "Game Over" or you save the princess and fireworks explode on the screen.

Most of the things we do everyday are not as structured as the games we love to play. And I've just realized that fiction is the same way. While reading about the hero's journey in Eldest I envy him his clear cut life. He knows what he needs to do (kill Galbatorix) he knows how he's going to do it (use magic) he knows where to go for more skills and resources (training with the Elves) and he knows when his goal is accomplished (either Galbatorix is dead or he, Eragon, is dead).

I'm beginning to wonder if we like fantasy because of the magic and action and general super-ness of it all or if we like fantasy and games because that's the only way we get structured experiences. Would you rather work on something in which you don't know what to do next, you can't use your skills and you aren't getting feedback or something where the objective is outlined, the steps are right in front of you and you get immediate feedback along the way?

Yeah, I'd choose the second option too.

For some reason experimentation, playing, problem solving and risk taking are engineered out of us. These qualities are viewed as immature or a waste of time and energy. But these are the qualities that make us fall in love with heros. We put the qualities we most want in ourselves into the characters we create and we envy these qualities in the characters we read about. But what about embracing these qualities in ourselves?

Metatropolis: Meta-worlds and Otherwise

There have been a lot of theories lately about what the future will hold for America and for the world. If you are an environmentalist you might hypothesize that in the near future we will all drown from a freak tidal wave. If you are Conservative you might live in fear that one day we step into 1984; if you are a Liberal you might celebrate. And if you’re a techie you might fantasize about a world where we all send our Avatars out into reality to do our bidding. Metatropolis, edited by John Scalzi, has a little bit for everyone.

While the stories in Metatropolis are written by different authors and the stories create worlds of their own, each story is a thread in the bigger world weaved by the writers. They have managed to take all of these theories, throw them in a hat, rattle them around, pour them out and just sit back while meta-worlds build themselves. Each of the five stories introduces you to a day-in-the-life of a city. They could be describing any city that has been altered over time or is currently going through a change. But don’t stop at envisioning, say, a city losing its manufacturing industry; the cities in Metatropolis are a little more meta than that.

There seems to be as many ways of defining meta as there are theories of what our future will look like. “Denoting a change of position or condition”, “something that is characteristically self-referential”, “at a later stage of development”, “after; beyond; with; adjacent; self”, and “an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter” are just a few I found online. Metatropolis illustrates all these definitions and more. There are virtual worlds within virtual worlds, virtual worlds projected on top of reality, characters who refer to the cities in the other stories and the continuing theme of change and altered cities.

“If you shot a time-lapse movie of the whole city at, say, a year-per-second, you’d see it evolving the same way. A city is a whirlpool of relationships but it changes so slowly that we humans have no control over how its currents and eddies funnel us through it.” This description is from a character in the last story, To Hie from Far Cilenia, comparing a real city to a game the characters play where virtual cities, societies and companies are created and dissolved overnight. It’s like World of Warcraft on steroids and projected on top of your own reality. Instead of role-playing from the comfort of their own couches, the characters go about their daily lives, seeing the fantasy world projected on the real world. And “leveling up” involves entering deeper into a game within a game. A game that has its own food production, prop production, real estate (virtual estate?) and currency. Talk about meta, right?

The live-off-the-land-nomad-style way of life the characters create, especially in Stochasti-City, are very appealing to me. The author of this story, Tobias S. Buckell, challenges the notion that huge leaps in society can’t possibly be made overnight. Through a complicated process of turking, where a big project is accomplished by divvying out tasks to multiple people referred to as turks, Buckell’s characters are able to take over a neglected business complex to install what they call Vertical Farms.

We are intimately introduced to the inner workings of a Vertical Farm in (big breath) Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis, where we follow a young man named Benjamin Washington at his new job as a Biological Systems Interface Manager. The “biological” bit refers to pigs and the “systems interface manager” bit refers to taking care of the pigs including, but not limited to, transporting poop to the recycling shoots in order to uphold the title of the story which is Latin for “Use everything but the squeal”. The pig’s pee is even turned into plastic. Oh, and the pigs are potty trained.

In these stories, the characters have created an alternate way of life without the need or even desire for traditional luxuries like grocery stores, cars, and even money. By building virtual worlds or vertical farms or forcing a 100% recycle-or-die policy they try to engineer human nature away or at least conform it to their own belief systems.

Metatropolis has forced me to question what I believe about my world right now. I’m actually Libertarian and had mixed feelings about the self-sufficient/police-state messages portrayed. And while I enjoyed wondering if my Libertarian ideals will hold up in a Meta-world my beliefs in individual freedom and a truly capitalist society remain unthreatened. We all need our worlds jarred every now and then. And no matter your political persuasion Metatropolis will definitely jar all your worlds, your Meta-worlds and otherwise.

So far, so good, still unread

I'm still plugging along. I haven't forgotten about you. I've finished reading Metatropolis edited by John Scalzi and Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris.

And I have so many more books to read. Perhaps I should set a deadline? But how would that work? I can barely read one book a month and even if I read 2 books a month it would take me 8.75 years to read all 210 books.

Eep!

That's a bit depressing when I put it that way. Almost 9 years without buying another book...

But I guess I probably have some that are so boring I couldn't finish them. So if it's not interesting by the 5th page I'll just stop reading and give it away. I might even be able to put some books in the give away pile right now. And that's why I joined www.paperbackswap.com.

I'm currently reading Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident. I learned today that Eoin Colfer, the author, is writing the 7th book of the Fowl series. Well, those will just have to wait...9 years.

Better get reading then.

Book Fever and Time Travel

I got into one of my book fevers today. I just had to have a book on Leonardo DaVinci. in my defense I am preparing a class on him and his inventions. So I went through my frenzy of checking on my local library's website and then on Amazon. I added 6 books on my Amazon wish list and printed off a list of about 15 books from the library. This is for work and I'm not buying them so it's aaaaallll good.

I just finished my first unread book on my list of 210 Unread Books. It's called The Time Travelers by Linda Buckley Archer and is the first book of The Gideon Trilogy.

It's about two English children who, by a freak encounter with an anti-gravity machine, end up transported to 1763. They meet a thief-turned gentleman, Gideon Seymour, who is hiding from the Tar Man who does whatever he can to bring him back to his former boss. The Tar Man steals the anti-gravity machine and the children team up with Gideon to get it back.

Linda's writing style is real and heavy and tangible. I wrote in my last post that she weaves a story like a chef mixes ingredients. You smell 18th century London, you hear the rustling of people as they walk down the cobbled roads, and you feel the jarring of the carriage as you race to win back the machine.

Youth sci-fi and fantasy is my all time favorite genre. And The Time Travelers deserves it's place among The Mysterious Benedict Society, Artemis Fowl and A Wrinkle in Time.

And now to my favorite part... what book shall I read next?